


The Law of Surprise

by Anoke



Series: Some Fucking *Bullshit* [3]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Feral Lambert (The Witcher), Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Lambert's backstory is depressing as hell you guys, Law Of Surprise, Nonbinary Lambert (The Witcher), Or at least comfort not really adequate to the hurt, Road Trips, Witcher 3 style investigative shennanigans, a little bit, gender non-conforming Lambert (The Witcher), lots of personal worldbuilding ideas, once upon a time the witchers were basically a union, standard warnings for the whole system that creates Witchers, witchers are monster nerds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 43,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24355231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anoke/pseuds/Anoke
Summary: "I choose to claim my reward by the Law of Surprise. The first thing you see when you arrive back home you will owe to me."(or: Lambert's trip to Kaer Morhen.)
Series: Some Fucking *Bullshit* [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1755709
Comments: 300
Kudos: 213





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Book canon claiming literal children, of ages 15 or less, can give meaningful consent? Sorry, can’t say I know him. 
> 
> (Also in the canon whaaaaat? column, Lambert saying "until Vesemir brought me to Kaer Morhen". Not everyone needs to be connected to the same four people, guys.)

His dad had come back later than usual last night, and woken Lambert up with his loud cursing. Mom'd stayed asleep; she was worn out from how hard she'd been working. Lambert tried not to disturb her as he slipped down from the top of the stove. He made enough noise that his father heard him; the man slurred "Poke up the damn fire!" in his general direction.

Lambert gritted his teeth but did as he was bidden. It was a few moments' work to bring the slumbering coals back to life, lighting the room in a dim orange glow. His father's eyes landed on him, and some terrible expression that Lambert couldn't identify crossed his face. He flinched, expecting a cuff, but the look faded into a strange satisfaction and his father looked away again with a grunt.

Lambert hovered there for a moment, uncertain, and his father snapped again.

"Quit staring, you stupid brat."

Lambert took the out and turned to climb back up to the top of the stove.

"Gimme the blanket, boy, I’m fucking injured," his father said, gesturing to his left leg, which was wrapped in a bandage of some sort.

Lambert knew better than to ask, and any night where he didn't have to sleep breathing in his dad's terrible alcohol sweat was a good one for him.

The next day, Lambert and his mother had just gotten back from collecting berbercane fruit all morning to make into jam. The fire in the shallow pit at the back of the house that his mother used for preserve-making was just beginning to catch when his father bellowed "Boy! Get out here!" from the front garden.

Lambert exchanged a glance with his mother, who was working to keep the kindling from going out, but obeyed at a trot—if it had his dad awake and moving before sunset today, it was more than his skin was worth to pretend he hadn’t heard—only to stop short at the sight of a stranger, with a _horse_ , standing next to his father. The stranger was muscular and wearing strange clothes; padded, with bits of leather everywhere, and he had _two swords_ strapped to his back. The man looked almost as surprised to see Lambert as Lambert felt at seeing him, but the expression disappeared quickly.

“Boy,” his dad snarled, but Lambert was not about to walk up to an armed man without assessing the situation first. 

Unfortunately, his dad wasn’t prepared to be patient. He strode over, limping slightly, and grabbed Lambert by his shirt, and when Lambert dug his heels in his dad lifted his other hand. Lambert squinched his eyes shut in anticipation. When the blow didn't land after a moment he opened them cautiously, to see the stranger with a grip on his dad's wrist.

"That won't be necessary," the man said in a voice like ice.

He didn't let go until Lambert's dad nodded slowly and let go of Lambert’s shirt. His dad stumbled back several paces the moment he could, rubbing at his wrist.

"What’s going o—" Lambert’s mother said, having come around the side of the house in the meantime. Lambert wasn’t sure why she hadn’t finished the whole sentence, but when he glanced at her her face was slowly turning pale.

The stranger turned his head to look at her, and she flinched.

"Last night, I saved your—husband?" Lambert’s mom nodded in confirmation, "Your husband's life. He'd wandered into a nest of nekkers, they're a kind of monster. He told me he didn't have anything to pay me with, so I offered to take payment in the form of the Law of Surprise; the first thing he saw when he came home, he would owe to me," the man explained, tone much gentler than before.

"But why does that—" his mom started, as a rushing sound rose in Lambert's ears. He might have swayed a little.

"Last night—" he whispered, and turned to look at his father in frantic alarm.

"You poked up the fire, and you were the first I saw," his dad confirmed with a snort.

His mom gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth.

"That means…" Lambert said, afraid to finish the thought.

The stranger crouched, drawing Lambert's attention.

"We're bound now, you and I," he said, looking right at Lambert's face. His eyes were yellow, and the pupils were narrow slits. "You're going to have to come with me."

“And good riddance, the brat,” his father grunted. “Well, Witcher, take your payment and get gone.”

The man’s—the Witcher’s?—eyes flicked to the side, and his face went cold again. “Surely he has things he needs to pack,” he said.

His father’s face soured, but he said to Lambert’s mother, “Sia, go pack the boy’s things. _He_ can stay right here. I won’t have the Witcher cheated on what he’s owed.”

His mother nodded, looking dazed, and Lambert desperately tried to catch her gaze. This couldn’t be happening. His dad couldn’t have come _this close_ to never coming home again, only to trade Lambert for his own rotten life. It wasn’t _fair_. His mother gave him a long and desperate look in return, but disappeared back inside the house.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you to my horse while we’re waiting,” the Witcher said, beckoning slightly.

Lambert wasn’t sure that he wanted to meet the horse. It was huge. And he absolutely didn’t want to leave his mom and go with a _Witcher_ to… wherever the Witcher was planning to take him.

The Witcher flicked his eyes to the side, where Lambert's father was standing, and back, very quickly. He gestured again. Lambert took a couple of hesitant steps forward. When he drew level with the Witcher, the man carefully straightened and guided Lambert over towards the horse.

“This is Adder,” he said quietly, when they were a couple paces away from the horse. The animal looked at them from one big dark eye, ears twitching. “And I’m Jorik. What’s your name, kid?”

“You can’t take me away,” Lambert said hoarsely, aware that it was stupid to try and get a Witcher to not take a child, but desperate all the same.

“Kid, even putting the question of the existence of Destiny aside, if I don’t, the next bit of bad luck your dad encounters he’s going to blame on you. And he’s going to keep blaming you,” the Witcher said, still very quiet. “It’s not fair that you’re in this situation, but life isn’t fair, and now that I’ve blundered my way into this, I’m not going to leave you to be beaten to death by your dad.”

“Why did you ask for the Law of Surprise, then?” Lambert said, trying to keep the stinging he felt in his eyes from spilling over into actual tears.

“I didn’t trust your dad not to renege on any other kind of promise, and he was a bitch and a half to rescue,” the Witcher said. “I wanted some kind of payment, and I honestly thought I would be getting a chicken or something.”

"You should have let him die!" Lambert hissed.

The Witcher sighed. "Kid, believe me, I'm with you on that. But this can't be undone. Here, hold your hand out flat, like this," he added in a louder voice, demonstrating the motion.

Lambert was a little taken aback by the sudden subject change, but it probably wasn't a good idea to disobey a direct instruction. He put his hand out the way the Witcher had demonstrated, and the Witcher stepped closer to the horse, taking the reins and murmuring to the beast. The horse gave Lambert a look but shifted her nose closer to him, snuffling a little.

"Put your hand on her muzzle and stroke a bit; downward motion." the Witcher said.

Lambert swallowed but moved his hand a little further until he was touching the horse. Her nose—muzzle?—was surprisingly soft and smooth. He was three strokes in, mesmerized by the sensation, when the horse shifted and moved her nose _right_ towards his face. He froze with a twitch, but she only sniffed at his hair and pushed her head, her forehead this time, back under his hand.

The Witcher looked like he was biting his lip. "Demanding thing, you are," he said to the horse. "Kid, rub in a circular motion with the tips of your fingers, that's what she's looking for."

Lambert followed his instructions and was a little surprised when the horse leaned into his hand. 

"She really likes that," he said, mostly to himself.

"She does," the Witcher said. "She's always looking for extra attention. Between us we _may_ be able to keep her happy."

Lambert swallowed hard, reminded that he was expected to leave with the Witcher, but his mom came back out with a nearly-folded stack of clothes and he lost his words.

"'bout damn time, woman," his dad grunted, and then looked suspicious. "What all is in there that it took so long?"

"I was packing them with pennyroyal," Mom murmured.

His dad looked like he wanted to say more, but the Witcher took several strides over and got a hand on the bundle.

"Very good of you, ma'am. Fleas and lice won't bother with me but they will bother with my horse, so I appreciate it." It looked like the Witcher might have said something else as he took the clothes from Lambert's mom, but Lambert couldn't hear.

"May I— say goodbye," his mother asked, tears welling in her eyes.

His dad snorted derisively, but the Witcher said "Of course."

Mom almost ran over to Lambert and wrapped him in an embrace. She whispered, "I packed a few extra things for you," into his ear, and rained kisses on his hair and forehead. "I love you so much, baby."

Lambert clung to her as hard as he could, crying too now.

She whispered love to him until his dad snarled "We're wastin' time here."

One last kiss to his forehead and she slipped out of his grasp and backed away. He wanted to run to her, but the Witcher put a hand on his shoulder.

"I'm going to put you on Adder," he said. "Try not to shift around too much while you're sitting on her."

Lambert wiped his nose on his shirt, wincing a little, tears still leaking out of his eyes, and looked back to the horse. Her back was very high up, for something that was going to be moving around while he was on it.

“Ready?” the Witcher asked.

 _No!_ Lambert wanted to scream. _No, I'm not ready to be taken from my home, my mom, my **life** by a Witcher! Kids that Witchers take are never seen again!_

But, of course, that wasn’t what the Witcher was asking. Lambert didn’t actually _have_ a choice about whether he was going with him or not. He knew the stories about what happened when Destiny was spurned, and so did his dad. The Witcher was right, too; if his dad could blame Lambert for _any_ bad thing that happened to him—

He swallowed, hard, and nodded.

The Witcher picked him up like he weighed no more than a pillow. “Leg up,” he said. “No, the other direction, easier to get it over her rump.” Lambert was deposited into the saddle, where he sat, not sure what else he was supposed to do.

“Scootch forward as far as you can,” the Witcher said. Lambert considered for a moment before bracing his arms on the saddle and swinging forward like he would on a big tree branch. He wound up pressed against the bit of the saddle that stuck up into the air, which wasn’t particularly comfortable. The Witcher somehow got up into the saddle too, and the horse snorted and shifted a bit. Lambert grabbed the sticking-up bit, a little worried.

“Shh, it’s only for a little while, girl,” the Witcher said, reaching past Lambert to pat the horse’s neck.

 _Only for a little while?_ Lambert thought. _That doesn't sound good._ Images of the Witcher killing him or making him run to keep up flashed through his head.

Then a hand landed on Lambert’s shoulder and he almost jumped out of his skin.

“Whoa, kid. It’ll be okay,” the Witcher said. 

Lambert couldn’t help angrily sniffling at that one, bringing a hand up to wipe at his face again. The hand on his shoulder squeezed gently, and then the Witcher picked up the reins and clicked his tongue and did something with his legs, and the horse started moving. Lambert turned his head to look back; his mom was still standing there, but Lambert couldn’t make out her face through the blur of the tears. He watched desperately until the house where he’d spent his entire life so far disappeared into the trees.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, crap. Now I'm committed.

Lambert wasn’t sure how long they rode, but it felt like a long while. They were headed north, though, he could tell that much from the sun. The sticking-up thing on the saddle kept poking into his stomach, which was already sore from where his dad had kicked him two nights ago, and his legs were starting to ache from straddling the horse. He couldn’t seem to stop crying, either, and the Witcher kept _touching_ him; his shoulder, his arm, squeezing every so often. At least he avoided the bruises. Lambert bitterly wondered if the Witcher was trying to figure out if he was fat enough to eat. Joke was on him, though—he was scrawny, his dad always said so, usually with a sneer.

Eventually, though, the Witcher brought the horse to a stop in the middle of a patch of woods that didn’t seem any different from all the other bits of wood they’d been riding through. He slid off the horse and Lambert scooted back gratefully.

“Sorry about that bit, it couldn’t have been very comfortable,” the Witcher said. “I didn’t think it was a good idea to hang around for too long, your father looked like he was getting annoyed.”

That startled a bitter, hiccupping laugh out of Lambert. “He’s always annoyed,” he said.

“Fair point,” the Witcher said. “Still didn’t think it was a great idea.”

“Why would you care, it’s not like he could hurt you,” Lambert said. If he was going to die anyway, he wouldn’t have to care about what he said.

The Witcher looked at him, with a very serious face. “I didn’t want your mom to get hurt because of me.”

That stole Lambert’s momentum entirely.

The Witcher took the moment to pull a waterskin off the stuff hanging off the horse and hand it to Lambert. Lambert stared at it and then the Witcher for a long moment, feeling extremely suspicious.

“I promise it’s just water,” the Witcher said. “You could probably use it.”

The Witcher wasn’t wrong; Lambert felt scratchy and dried out from the crying. He popped the cork and took a cautious sip. The water tasted like leather, but it was amazing, and he started drinking in earnest. When he lowered the skin, the Witcher was holding part of a loaf of bread in his hand.

“I never did get your name, kid,” the Witcher said. 

Lambert eyed the bread. This was absolutely a trap of some sort, but the bread at breakfast and the berbercane he’d eaten while he and his mom were gathering them felt a _very_ long time ago. He could probably at least trick his stomach into thinking he was fine with more of the water, but the bread was _right_ there.

“...Lambert,” he said.

“Right, Lambert. There’s a couple things we need to go over before we go any further,” the Witcher said, handing Lambert the bread. “We can take a short break, talk, and then we’ll keep moving.”

The bread wasn’t fresh, but it was _delicious_. It reminded him of the bits Aunt Irina would feed him sometimes, made with wheat instead of rye or barley or millet or, sometimes, acorns. He had to avoid the sore side of his mouth, but that wasn't a problem. This time he noticed the Witcher reaching into the saddlebags, and he watched warily as the man pulled out a chunk of cheese.

“First and most importantly; if I give you an order, you need to obey it. Immediately and to the fullest extent you can. If I make a request, you can ask for more information or what have you, but if I’m giving you an order the situation is almost certainly life-or-death, and you need to listen.” The Witcher had that really serious face again.

Lambert nodded. He wasn't sure he bought that, but he understood what the Witcher wanted.

"Say it back to me," the Witcher said, clearly testing Lambert.

"If you give me an order, like that one just now, I have to obey it," Lambert said, not about to be caught that easily.

The Witcher's lips twitched, but at least he looked amused. He also handed over the cheese. Lambert made a mental note to do some foraging, when he could get away with it; he didn't want to be completely dependent on the Witcher for food.

"Second, I'm not going to eat you or kill you or magic you into being my slave or whatever rot people are gossiping about nowadays. I'm taking you to the keep where Witchers of the Wolf School," and here the Witcher held up a medallion on a chain around his neck, in the shape of a snarling wolf's head, "are trained. Maybe you'll become a Witcher, maybe you won't. It's not up to me."

Lambert felt a little sick, holding the cheese he'd been eating. So the intention was to take him and maybe—mutate him, make him a freak like the Witchers were. Everyone said Witchers weren’t at all the same as other men—they didn’t have emotions, they killed without even thinking about it (or possibly with enjoyment, which seemed like it might run counter to the no emotions thing to Lambert)—and here was one saying he might _become_ one.

"Who's it up to?" he asked. 

"The trainers are the first step; if they don't think you can handle it they'll find you somewhere you can live. Part of that, actually— how old are you?" the Witcher asked.

Lambert squinted a little, trying to decide whether skewing older or younger would be better.

"I can generally tell when people are lying," the Witcher said. "Comes with the inhuman senses."

Lambert scowled. "Nine winters," he said, grumpy. He'd have to test that whole lying thing, but it wouldn't work right now, with the Witcher prepared.

The Witcher whistled a little, which also drew a snort from the horse. "Right near the cutoff point. Could probably go either way then. But if the trainers accept you, the rest of the equation is skill, hard work, and a whole lot of luck."

“Luck?” Lambert asked, immensely suspicious.

“Our lives are dangerous ones,” the Witcher said.

“So— and you're just _taking_ me to that?” Lambert said, feeling like he might explode from the ball of emotions building in his gut. Why the _hell_ hadn’t the Witcher just left him with his mom, if the life in store for him was going to be just as dangerous as living at home? The horse shifted under him, and he grabbed at the saddle.

“Lambert, you’re nine and you already have multiple scars," the Witcher said, steadying the horse. "I don't know if that tooth you're missing was permanent or not, but the gum is swollen, and that's got to be hurting. You’ve got the fading remains of a broken nose and two black eyes, you’ve been wincing whenever the saddle horn poked your stomach, you're covered in bruises, and don’t tell me you haven’t had a broken arm or two at the very least. And all of that for _no damn reason_ , apart from your father being a piece of shit. A Witcher's life is hard and dangerous, but at least when I get hurt it's because I'm _helping_ people.”

That was possibly the most blatant lie Lambert had ever heard. Nobody just _helped_ people because they wanted to. Plus, Witchers got paid, Lambert had _heard_ him say it.

Some of that might have shown on his face, because the Witcher sighed. “Anyway, it’s not something to worry about for a while. We still have to get there, and that's going to take a while. You're not familiar with horses at all, right?"

Lambert shook his head.

"Well, I'll teach you how to care for and ride Adder, here," the Witcher said, patting her. "Maybe teach you some knife work too. You familiar with hunting animals, or cleaning and gutting them?"

"A little," Lambert said. "Sometimes from an old chicken or, or a rooster once. Mom— kn- knows a lot about plants but not—" to his shame he felt tears welling up again. He couldn’t, he _couldn’t_ stay with the Witcher. He had to get back to his mom. He’d rather be with his mom and be getting hit by his dad than heading off into a dangerous unknown with a Witcher who may or may not want to turn him into one of them. The horse snorted a little and pricked her ears back when he sniffed again.

“Ah hell. Sorry, kid,” the Witcher said and patted him on the knee. “I was going to ask about that next, but— I’ll show you some alchemy when we stop for the night, maybe. Finish the cheese if you can and have a little more water, and we’ll keep moving.”

Lambert was perfectly familiar with eating immediately if he could, and finished off the last couple bites while still sniffling, washing them down with more water. He made to scoot forward in the saddle again, but the Witcher held up a hand.

“I’m staying off her for now,” the Witcher said. “Not a good idea to overload a horse, and you could use the ride more than I could. Lesson one, you want to hold on to the saddle with your thighs, not your hands.”

That sort of made sense, Lambert had to admit. It looked like you had to be doing things with your hands while you were riding a horse, so you would need to use your legs to grip. He’d done similar things before, picking things from high up in trees while straddling branches.

“And two…” the Witcher moved closer and took Lambert’s ankle. Lambert froze. “It’s okay, I just need to see how much I have to shorten the stirrups. Sit up straight and bend your knee for me, okay?”

Lambert had no idea what a stirrup was and he wasn’t sure he wanted to, but he straightened and drew his heel up slowly until the Witcher told him to stop.

“Okay, can you hold that for a minute?” the Witcher said.

Lambert nodded.

“Good,” the Witcher said, and pulled out— a _knife_ , what the hell was he going to do with that?

The Witcher looked up at Lambert, a slight frown on his face. Lambert was pretty sure he was sweating with the effort of _not moving_.

“Lambert,” the Witcher said. “I just have to punch a hole in part of the saddle stuff so I can adjust a buckle. It’ll give you a place to put your feet.”

The Witcher took his hand off of Lambert's ankle, and there was a slight noise. Lambert risked a glance down. The Witcher was holding up a dangling strap with a metal loop at the end. 

"That's the stirrup," the Witcher said. “The buckle’s under a flap here,” he added, gesturing with his off hand to a spot on the saddle right up by Lambert's crotch. "I'm gonna adjust that so I can make a new hole for the buckle, okay?"

Lambert wasn't sure if he could talk, so he nodded.

"Okay," the Witcher said, watching him with those unnerving eyes for another moment before reaching towards the saddle.

There was indeed a buckle under the flap, but that didn't make it any easier to not move, with a knife that close. The Witcher undid it and slid the strap along through the buckle. Lambert felt the stirrup bump his foot.

"Okay, now we check the measurement before I start poking holes in my gear. I'm going to need your ankle again," the Witcher said. Lambert nodded, a bit jerkily, and the Witcher held the strap (and his knife) in place with one hand and took Lambert's ankle with the other. He slid Lambert's foot into the stirrup and made several small adjustments.

"How's that feel?" the Witcher asked.

Lambert shrugged. It felt—really weird, he had the ball of his foot on the metal loop and his heel was slightly higher than his toes.

The Witcher's lips twitched. "Fair enough. It's an odd position when you're not used to it. There's a couple reasons you want your feet that way— but let me get this set." 

He let go of Lambert's foot and went back to the strap. Lambert was dreading what was going to happen as the Witcher started working the knife, but the Witcher had a hole made in the strap before thirty seconds had passed, and the knife never slipped. The other stirrup went even quicker.

"Right, let's get going," the Witcher said, flipping the reins over the horse's head and taking them in a hand. "Try not to kick her in the sides, you'll just confuse her."

Lambert, who had not been at all planning on potentially antagonizing an animal several times his size, nodded once more. The Witcher clicked his tongue, and the horse started walking again, further and further north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How the everloving heck did I manage to write this much over one conversation and getting stirrups adjusted?? This is going to eventually have to speed up, it's going to take them at LEAST two weeks to get to Kaer Morhen.
> 
> Other notes: Jorik isn't used to... I was going to say abused kids, but I suppose technically it's not used to kids abused in this manner. He's trying, but he's not perfect, and he's going to continue not being perfect.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, content warning here regarding stuff with teeth: Lambert's still got part of the root of the tooth his dad knocked out stuck in his gum, and Jorik removes it. Jorik also mentions that he's lost quite a few teeth, but according to my headcanon, they've all grown back. The scene isn't crazy in-depth, but it happens, and there's a couple references to Lambert having a bit of basically-gauze in his mouth afterwards. The scene starts right after Jorik lights their campfire for the evening, at '"Now, while we wait for that to burn down a bit, how about I have a look at that lost tooth and make sure your mouth is going to heal?"' and more or less ends around 'The Witcher smiled again and turned to look at the fire. “We can probably start cooking, don’t you think?”'

They kept going north for the entire rest of the day, until Lambert was exhausted, riding or not. The Witcher kept them off the roads the entire time.

 _Worried about what would happen if people saw him taking a child_ , Lambert thought. That was important to know; if he could get away and find a large enough group of people, the Witcher might have to leave him be.

The biggest problem with that idea, of course, was that Lambert had no idea where the road or a village may be. Something to think about later, when he wasn’t so tired as to be swaying a little in the saddle. The Witcher eyed him the second time it happened, and then when they came to a little partially open space in the trees, he slowed the horse to a halt and looked around. Lambert did too, wondering if he was missing something.

He wouldn’t go so far as to call it a true clearing, but there was a tree that had fallen over recently enough that the space it had shaded hadn’t yet grown back in. The space was filled with grass and broadleaf plants flourishing in the unexpected sunlight. Lambert identified celandine and blowball and several other flowering plants, growing riotously in the unexpected sunlight.

The Witcher helped him down from the horse and then held him upright when his knees tried to buckle under him.

“Yeah, that happens at the start,” he said, half-carrying Lambert over to a rock near the downed tree. "You sit tight for tonight."

"Tonight?" Lambert asked.

"Eventually you'll need to know how to set up and break down a camp, might as well start learning," the Witcher said, walking back over to the horse and starting to take things off of her. 

The thought of needing to do more work when he was this tired was upsetting. Before he could get too caught up in it, though, the Witcher set the saddlebags and other bits and bobs—including an iron pot with a lid—down, right next to Lambert.

"The things from your mom are in this pocket," he said, pointing. "Now; do _**not**_ ingest _anything_ in there unless I say it's okay. There's a lot of stuff I have that's _extremely_ poisonous to humans. The waterskin is fine, but leave everything else alone until I can go through it with you."

"Okay," Lambert said, a little worried. It wasn't as if his mom hadn't warned him about poisonous stuff before, but she'd never done it quite so emphatically.

"All right," the Witcher said, and he took a couple things out of the bags and walked back over to the horse. He patted the horse, murmuring to her, and rubbed at her with a blanket and went over her with a couple of brushes. She lifted her hooves as the Witcher ran his hands down her legs, and the Witcher took out a little tool and dug around her hooves with them. Lambert's fingers twitched with the desire to hold the things that his mom had given him, but he wasn't about to go through them with the Witcher _right there_.

"There's a creek not too far from here," the Witcher said. "I'm going to take Adder over so she can have a drink and so I can collect some water for the night. If you need anything, just yell, I'll hear you."

"Okay," Lambert said. He couldn't hear the sound of water at all.

When the Witcher was out of sight, Lambert stopped himself reaching for the saddlebags and tried to get up. He grit his teeth and managed to get to the edge of the space to relieve himself, then to hobble in a circle around the clearing before he had to sit down again.

 _Shit_. He needed to be able to move if he was going to be able to escape. And he needed to escape as soon as possible—the further away they got from his home, the harder it was going to be to find his way back. Even another day of traveling might put him beyond where he _could_ get back. He rubbed his hands down his aching legs a few times, then finally opened at the saddlebags.

His other set of clothes was right on top. His mother had folded them neatly, but as Lambert picked them up he felt a couple of lumps in the stack.

 _Did Mom—_ Lambert had to keep himself from digging wildly through the clothes, instead lifting the shirt and the trousers and the braies slowly. He extracted two little jars of pickles and several sprigs of pennyroyal, set them carefully down and—

He almost dropped everything into the dirt anyway, clutching Zdena to his chest. To this day he still didn't know how his mom had managed to pay for the gorgeous rag doll with the bright patterned skirt and elaborately embroidered blouse. Lambert had seen Zdena in a merchant's stall four autumns back and had stared the whole time his mom had been negotiating, until Aunt Irina had gently shooed him into her house to feed him.

The next evening, when Lambert's dad had gone into town to drink away his mom's profits, she'd handed Zdena to Lambert with a smile.

He'd known better than to let on that he had a pretty doll to his dad. A man who berated his son for flinching when he beat him was not going to accept a doll lying down. Zdena therefore had lived in a secret hiding place, along with the pennies his mom carefully saved. He actually got to hold and play with Zdena pretty often; his dad was usually away drinking in the evenings, and he was often home late enough that Lambert and his mom had already finished with the chores for the day quite some time ago. Lambert would be happy even if he only ever got to hold Zdena, but he got to do so much more than that.

They talked about clothes a lot, obviously—Zdena was very fashionable—but they'd also gone on grand adventures where they'd outwitted Baba Yaga (they'd convinced her they were little girls and gained her help), or where Zdena played the Prince to Cinderella and lifted Lambert and his mom up to a life of luxury.

He had to spend a little while holding Zdena close before he continued looking through his clothes. He tucked Zdena into the crook of his arm as he carefully checked the toes of his extra socks, and he turned up— three pennies, a tiny fortune by his measure. He stared at them. How had his mom decided she could spare them? He knew she only had a couple of orens in their secret stash, carefully saved and almost as carefully spent.

He slid the coins into his shoes, since he wasn't up to walking anywhere right now, repacked the clothes and pennyroyal and pickles and loaded them into the saddlebags, and held Zdena some more, whispering what had happened up until now. He spent as long as he dared, until twilight was starting to edge in, then carefully tucked Zdena into his shirt and adjusted his jacket until nothing looked suspicious. He was right on time, too, as the Witcher came back with the horse only about a minute later. The Witcher was carrying a bunch of water, four fish—trout, maybe—that had already been gutted and cleaned, and an assortment of plants. Lambert recognized burdock leaves that were probably going to serve as a wrapper and some various herbs, some whole wild garlic and wild radish among them.

“Lambert, could you do me a favor and get these ready to go while I collect wood?” the Witcher asked, setting the plants and fish on the rock next to him and the water beside him. 

Privately, Lambert thought it was going to be a long while before they needed the fish ready, but he didn’t object. The Witcher nodded and staked the horse in range of the grass in the partial-clearing, which she promptly began grazing on, and walked back into the woods. 

Lambert stuffed the fish with the herbs and carefully wrapped them before setting them back down on the rock. The radish roots he kept separate; they could roast on their own in the coals. His stomach growled as he was getting everything ready—he glared at it, angry. He’d already had a lot of food today, it shouldn’t be complaining. 

When he was done getting things ready, he thought for a minute and decided he should probably clear a space for a fire. He shuffled off the rock and into a clear spot, then took out his little knife and started digging up the grass. He had a good spot of bare dirt by the time the Witcher came back with a big armful of wood.

"Oh, thank you, Lambert," he said, and put the wood down just outside the cleared space.

Lambert shrugged, feeling a little uncomfortable, and tiredly reclaimed his seat on the rock. The Witcher started stacking wood in the dirt, quickly and efficiently. He built a good platform, then sat back on his heels and dusted his hands. Something struck Lambert—the Witcher had only used larger pieces of wood. He couldn’t see any tinder or kindling anywhere.

"There's no—" Lambert started, and the Witcher made a hand gesture and the logs immediately burst into flame. Lambert's eyes popped.

“We call them Signs,” the Witcher said. “This one is Igni. It’s very useful, as you can see.”

“You can do magic?” Lambert whispered, wrapping his arms around himself. The fire had appeared from _nowhere_.

"Only a few things," the Witcher said. "Igni's probably the most useful for everyday tasks. Makes cooking a lot simpler, I'll tell you that."

Lambert looked to the fire, where the logs were burning merrily as if the whole setup had been started before the Witcher had headed down to the river. Yeah, that was almost stupidly convenient. It would take so much less time to cook things like this.

"Now, while we wait for that to burn down a bit, how about I have a look at that lost tooth and make sure your mouth is going to heal?" the Witcher asked.

Lambert just looked at the Witcher, frowning slightly, mouth closed.

"I wasn't kidding about the possibility that it could get infected," the Witcher said quietly. "It's a lot easier to make sure everything's clear now instead of trying to stop a raging infection later."

Lambert's frown turned into a scowl, but the Witcher had a point. He knew about cleaning scrapes he got from climbing trees or cuts he got from his dad, and while he hadn't considered his dad knocking out one of his teeth to be a _wound_ , exactly, it had been sore for the past couple days. He opened his mouth wide.

“Ah. Hold up for a second, I need to prep a few things,” the Witcher said, starting to undo buckles on his bracers.

Lambert closed his mouth again and watched in silence as the Witcher removed his bracers and gloves, and took some stuff out of his bags. One looked like a small medical kit; the Witcher scrubbed his bare hands quickly, then pulled out a tiny bit of mirror, a pair of tweezers, and a tiny bottle of what smelled like very strong alcohol. The Witcher dipped the tweezers in the bottle, and then, with another little flash, set the tweezers on fire. Lambert twitched.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to get these anywhere near you while they’re still hot,” the Witcher said, gently waving the tweezers through the air. “Okay, open please.”

Lambert opened his mouth but couldn’t help watching as the light brown hands of the Witcher came towards him. There were a bunch of little scars on them, strips of lighter skin criss-crossing the knuckles.

It wasn’t very comfortable to have the Witcher poking around his mouth, much less poking at his sore gum, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much as it did when Lambert accidentally poked it himself. Instead of trying to stare at the Witcher’s hands, which was just making him go cross-eyed, Lambert looked up to the Witcher’s face. He noticed, a little surprised, that the slit pupils had widened and rounded out, so much so that he couldn’t even see the yellow of the Witcher’s irises.

“Yeah, looks like there’s part of the tooth still stuck in there,” the Witcher said, almost to himself. “I need to get it out, which is probably going to hurt a bit.”

Lambert made an affirmative noise, just wanting this over with.

It did hurt. But the pain started fading a little almost immediately afterwards, and the Witcher put a little bit of bandaging up to the spot and had Lambert close his mouth over it so he wasn’t having to drool or swallow blood.

“Yeah, see that?” the Witcher asked, holding out the tweezers. There was a little bit of tooth in them, and Lambert nodded. The Witcher tossed the bit into the fire, cleaned off everything again, and packed it all away.

"How do you know—" Lambert asked, a little awkward around the bandaging.

The Witcher grinned. "I've lost enough teeth in my day," he said. "Thankfully mine grow back."

Lambert stared a little, not sure what to say.

The Witcher smiled again and turned to look at the fire. “We can probably start cooking, don’t you think?”

The fire _had_ burned down a bit, and Lambert was still tired and hungry. He nodded. The Witcher rearranged some of the coals with a stick and buried the wrapped fish and the radish roots in them. 

Lambert wasn’t looking forward to the awkward silence that was probably going to ensue, but the Witcher just took out a little kit and started taking care of his swords and a couple of knives he pulled out. Lambert was happy to leave him to it, hug Zdena through his jacket, and slip halfway into a doze, listening to the _zzzzing_ of the stone against the blades.

When the noise stopped, he blinked his eyes open, to see the Witcher rolling the fish out of the coals with his stick. He pushed one and some of the radishes over to Lambert. Lambert pulled the bit of bandage out of his mouth—it had blood on it, but not a ton—disposed of it in the fire, and took out his little knife again, carefully peeling back the charred leaf on the trout. The fish looked perfectly done, and Lambert almost scorched his fingers opening it up a bit so it could cool. 

Finally it was cool enough to eat, and Lambert had to stop for a second to appreciate the first mouthful of flaky, flavorful meat. He devoured it all and the peppery radish roots in record time, and looked over to the Witcher to see that he was most of the way through two of the other three trout—including more of the heads than Lambert had eaten.

The Witcher paused and looked at him. “You want a little more?” he asked, nudging the last trout.

Lambert assessed that. He wouldn’t _mind_ eating more, but he didn’t want to come off as a glutton—and furthermore, he wasn’t still _really_ hungry. He shook his head.

The Witcher looked at him a little longer, but nodded and finished off his second fish before starting on the third. He ate half of it and said “If you want the rest, you can have it,” before getting up and starting to spread out his bedroll.

Now _that_ Lambert wasn’t about to get caught by. He left the rest of the fish completely alone and started rubbing at his sore legs again.

He thought that the Witcher looked a little unhappy when he looked back over, but he didn't say anything.

 _Ha_ , Lambert thought. _I wasn't about to fall for that one. Just how stupid do you think I am?_

"Well kid, bed's ready whenever you are," the Witcher said at last.

Lambert frowned. "That's your bedroll."

"It is, but you can have it for the night. I'll meditate instead."

Lambert wasn't sure what meditation was, and it probably showed on his face, because the Witcher clarified.

"It's, hmm, a little hard to explain, but it's a bit like a trance. Witchers use it regularly, for a lot of reasons. I'll get enough rest, if that's what you're worried about."

It wasn't, but the word 'trance' was helpful. If that meant roughly the same thing as it did when it came to chickens, Lambert might be able to sneak away tonight.

He nodded at the Witcher and took several long drinks of water so that he'd wake up in the night, and limped, exaggerating slightly, over to the bedroll.

"Good night, kid," the Witcher said quietly.

Lambert pulled the blankets up and started planning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hmm, this is going to turn out well, isn't it.
> 
> Next chapter: Jorik POV!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jorik at the start of this chapter:  
> https://youtu.be/m0JME7eodTk?t=43  
> (look, I like DBZ Abridged, obviously)
> 
> What Jorik has isn't actually a chavunok, but I couldn't use ‘dutch oven’, the word dutch as used in that fashion wouldn’t exist, so I went with something with a similar purpose.

At first, Jorik wasn’t entirely sure what roused him from his meditation. Nothing was trying to bite his face off and Adder was calmly dozing where he’d picketed her. He focused his senses and heard the hissing and shrieking of some nekkers on the hunt, but they were too far away to be a threat to him currently—

His gaze fell on his laid-out bedroll. It was empty.

_Oh **shit** , the kid!!_

Jorik shot to his feet and broke into a flat-out sprint towards the nekkers, cussing himself out in every language that he knew as he ran. Fuck fuck _fuck_ , he had known the kid hadn't wanted to come with him, he'd noted when Lambert had asked him what the point of taking him was— he'd been _expecting_ an escape attempt of some sort, but he'd been idiotic enough to think that the kid would be too tired and sore to sneak past him tonight. _Fuck._ He could only hope that, if Destiny did exist, it hadn't handed him Lambert just to kill him less than a day later.

Fuck that too; he’d asked for the Law of Surprise _once_ , because rescuing that drunken jackass of a man had been an even more annoying and thankless task than usual, and he immediately wound up with a child. He wasn't sure if he should be thanking the mages for making Witchers sterile or cursing their names; if the bastard's luck of first time child acquisition had been doubled none of them would have been safe, but if it had merely been transferred he could definitively say he would prefer actually needing to use condoms.

As long as the nekkers were still making noise, Lambert was probably still alive.

_Please stay alive, kid._

It took far, far too long to reach the group of nekkers. He drew his blade as he skidded in, removing an arm and a head from two of the little fuckers as he did so, getting their disgusting blood splattered all over his face. He hadn’t heard any screams from Lambert, but he could smell human fear-sweat and a note of human blood, and his vision tunneled as he cut down two more of the swarming monsters. He couldn’t see the kid anywhere, but the scent went—up?

He risked a glance and saw the kid balancing on a wide branch in a tree above him, clutching a large, recently-broken stick and determinedly bashing at a nekker trying to claw its way up the trunk with it. The thought of the vicious little ogroid managing to reach the kid enraged him and he pulled his crossbow and sent a bolt into the monster trying to get to Lambert. The kid, in what was either a miracle of coincidence or some startlingly good coordination, smacked the creature with his stick and sent it crashing to the ground. It screeched in pain, and Jorik saw its leg was severely broken. He lowered its priority, mentally, and focused on the other four nekkers. One of them made the extremely ill-advised decision to leap directly at him, and he sliced it in half in the air and then broke the neck of the one that had lunged in behind it with a kick.

That just left two. They tried a pincer attack, but Jorik just sidestepped and cut them down after they ran into each other. He stabbed the one at the base of the tree and stared up at Lambert, torn between feeling impressed and just a touch _absolutely furious_. The kid had _been_ impressive; managing to get up the tree in time to keep from getting killed, holding off the one trying to climb it—hell, even his refusal to yell for help was impressive in its own way, despite also falling into the enraging category.

Lambert stared down at him, clearly untrusting.

"Lambert," Jorik said, attempting to sound calm, "please come down."

The kid just shrunk into a smaller ball on his branch. A drop of something warm hit Jorik in the face, and he really wished there were a couple more nekkers around when he realized it was Lambert's blood.

"Lambert, you're bleeding. I want to get you bandaged. _Please_ come down." If the kid didn't climb down of his own free will or at an order, Jorik was going to have to climb up and get him. He was fine with heights, but he wanted the kid to trust him at least a little, and he also didn't particularly want to meet the business end of that stick.

The kid didn't move, his absolute frozen stillness just as telling as a flinch would be. Jorik resisted the temptation to groan and breathed in deeply. Lambert wasn't bleeding too badly, as far as he could tell.

"Please at least put some pressure on that injury," Jorik said, and wiped down his sword and his face before starting to collect nekker bodies to burn. If he couldn't coax the kid out of the tree after that, he'd need to go up and grab him—it would be an extremely bad idea to leave Adder and all his gear alone for too long, and he wasn’t about to abandon Lambert either.

He had all the bits of monster piled about ten feet from the tree Lambert was up within a couple of minutes. He purposely didn’t look up at the kid, but he made sure his ears were pricked that direction the whole time—he was _not_ about to let the kid disappear on him again. There had been some shifting, but nothing that suggested Lambert was trying to climb down to sneak away again. He lit up the corpses with a concentrated burst of Igni and heard a tiny gasp.

“Monsters aren’t above eating each other’s remains,” he said aloud. “I’d prefer not to draw any necrophages this close to the camp.”

He turned and looked up with a sigh. Lambert was pressed up against the trunk of the tree. He was balancing his stick a little precariously across his legs and he had a hand pressed to just above his ankle.

"Look, Lambert," Jorik started, but then he paused. He didn't want to lie to the kid, but he knew that acknowledging that he was angry was just going to make the kid more convinced that Jorik was going to hurt him. "I swear, on anything you want to name, I will not hurt you for this. Any of this. I just want to get us both back to camp before something else happens and get your leg patched up. Will you please come down?"

Jorik saw the kid sniff—well, he wasn’t about to blame him for crying—and drop the stick. He then quickly realized, as Lambert started to climb down and almost slipped, that the leg wound would _not_ be helpful in getting out of the tree.

“ _Shit_ ,” he said quietly, taking a few quick steps over to the base of the trunk. “I’ll catch you if you fall, okay?”

Lambert’s jaw set mulishly, and he managed the rest of the climb down without incident. Jorik got a look at the claw marks on his leg on the way down—they were long, but pretty shallow. Likely one of the nekkers had tried to grab him as he was getting up the tree.

 _Ah hell, I have to get him back to camp_ , Jorik realized. _And I’m covered in blood._

Lambert stood in front of him, still apart from a slight tremble, shoulders hunched. His arms were crossed over the lump in his jacket that seemed to be a favorite toy of some kind. He looked even more miserable than he had crying on Adder that afternoon.

"Right, let me just get this off so you don't get blood all over you," Jorik said, undoing his sword belts in preparation to strip off his gambeson. The blood hadn’t soaked all the way through to his shirt quite yet, so he hopefully wouldn’t end up ruining literally half of the kid’s entire stock of clothes.

Lambert looked like he wanted to ask a question, but he didn't say anything.

"I'm going to carry you back," Jorik said, starting to undo the ties on his gambeson. "You did a good job sneaking off, we're at least a mile from camp, and I'm not going to make you walk back on that." He nodded at Lambert's leg.

Lambert’s eyes went wide and worried, but Jorik thought he might know at least part of what it was about. He turned around and crouched. “Come on, pick-a-back’ll be easiest,” he said, and listened to Lambert carefully shifting his toy around under his shirt before hooking his arms over Jorik’s shoulders.

“Up we go,” Jorik said, and stood. The kid wasn’t starvation-skinny, thanks probably entirely to his mother, but he was a lot scrawnier than most nine-year-olds. Either way, Jorik would still barely notice.

The trek back took a bit longer, since Jorik wasn’t sprinting, and it was extremely awkward to juggle his weapons and gambeson while supporting Lambert’s legs, but it was far quicker then it would have been if Lambert had been walking. Praise be to any deities that may or may not exist, nothing had been disturbed at the camp. Adder nickered quietly, probably at the smell of blood, but she recognized him and didn’t panic. Jorik set Lambert down near the rock and threw another couple branches on the fire. The blood on his hands was dry enough that he could dig out his medical kit and another rag, and get to scrubbing it off with a bit of soap and the rag dipped into the water in his chavunok.

He noticed the kid was still standing, staring at him.

"Kid, you can sit down. We need to clean that out, I’m just making sure I’m not going to get a bunch of nekker blood in it,” he said, nodding to the claw marks.

Lambert half-collapsed onto the rock, wrapping his arms around himself.

"That's what those things were?" he asked, a little quavery.

Jorik nodded. "You did a good job, kid. You must've gotten up that tree in record time, and you were holding them off pretty damn well." 

The thing, too, was that he wasn’t lying. He’d been upset the kid was in danger, but Lambert had done an astoundingly good job of keeping himself safe, and he’d managed to keep sight of his original plan well enough to not ruin it by purposely waking the man he’d been trying to run away from. It might make continuing to escort the kid a pain in the ass, but it wasn’t as if the kid’s view of the situation wasn’t an understandable and sympathetic one— and Jorik just _couldn’t_ stay mad over a well-thought-out and well-executed plan that had happened to have gone awry.

"I heard them," the kid muttered. "Didn't think it was a good idea to stick around."

"Even better," Jorik said. "Knowing when you're outmatched is important."

Lambert winced, and Jorik realized the other way that sentence could have been taken. _Shit._

“Can you stick your leg out?” Jorik asked, trying to change the subject, and Lambert complied.

He also froze with a twitch again the second Jorik reached out to get a closer look, and Jorik suppressed a frown. It wasn’t as if most people weren’t already afraid of Witchers, but knowing that the kid’s reactions to men reaching towards him had been instilled by another human—by his _father_ — Well. But showing his anger wouldn’t be productive, and furthermore it wasn’t getting the kid’s wounds cleaned any faster.

He’d been right in his original assessment; they weren’t that deep, and he couldn’t see any visible debris in them. The only thing to worry about, then, were any nasty bacteria on the nekker’s claws. Jorik always had a bunch of clean rags on hand, and he used a new one and another bit of soap to work up a good lather, then gently cleaned out the wounds. It pretty clearly stung like hell; the kid's face took on a rather drawn look that Jorik associated with stoicism.

When he was finished, he wrapped them up, securing the bandages with a small knot.

“Try and get a little more sleep, okay?” he said, gesturing to his bedroll. The kid stared at him, eyes wide. He was going to need a little more reassurance, obviously.

“I— look. It’s not _great_ that you ran off in the middle of the night and almost got killed by monsters, but I get why you tried. You got a scare, some scratches, and a little less sleep, and I may have to put a bell on you or something, but that’s quite enough in the way of consequences.”

“But you—” Lambert started, clearly startled into speaking.

“I have to get my armor and swords clean again, but those are _my_ consequences for letting you get into danger,” Jorik said. “I told you; I’m responsible for you.”

The kid was silent, probably trying to process.

"Get a little more sleep," Jorik repeated. "Got a long day ahead tomorrow."

That reminder seemed to jar him a little, and he slunk back under the blankets and curled up in a ball. Jorik heard him move his toy back to where he could hold it, although it didn't seem to calm him much—maybe because he had to worry about hiding it from Jorik, the kid obviously didn't want him to see it. Jorik sat and listened to the kid's slightly hitching breath for a minute. He didn’t seem to be actively crying again, but he wasn’t far from it, and he probably wasn’t going to get to sleep anytime soon.

Well, it wasn’t as if _he_ was going to sleep or meditate anymore tonight anyway. He might as well get things clean before the blood fully set. His trousers, hardened leather, and bracers just needed a wipe down, but the gambeson he crammed into his glorious multi-use chavunok and scrubbed with yet more soap before leaving it to soak for the rest of the night.

He’d finished that task and was cleaning his sword again while making a mental list of supplies he would need to pick up in a town—as soon as he could leave the kid in a safe spot with Adder without him running off, anyway—when Lambert’s breath finally evened out and his heart rate slowed into true sleep.

Jorvik let himself look at the kid and just feel, for a minute. Lambert was almost the polar opposite of his father, despite the nearly-mirrored situation he’d just wound up in. The kid was smart, brave, and sensible, and although Jorik hoped he’d live though and become a Witcher, it was clear he’d be able to do well in almost any situation he was put in. Jorik just had to make sure he lived long enough to thrive.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wherein I fall back on my true passion: explaining things.

Lambert woke up hurting. That wasn’t exactly new, but the specific _way_ he was hurting was. Instead of his head, or arms, or torso, his legs were—

There was a neigh, and suddenly he remembered. He shrank down under the blankets.

He’d _failed_.

He'd taken a chance and he'd _fucked up_. He hadn't managed to get away. This had been his _best damn chance_ and it had been _completely blown_ by those _fucking monsters—_

Remembering the nekkers made him shiver. He'd never seen monsters before. They were _terrifying_. He'd heard something in the underbrush a little ways away and had scrambled for the tree the second he'd heard the noise getting closer, and he'd still only _just_ been able to get high enough that the things hadn't been able to jump on him and claw him to pieces. He didn't know if they would have given up if he'd been able to hold them off for long enough, but he'd _had_ to try.

And then _something_ had alerted the Witcher and Lambert's plans had been completely destroyed. He'd dashed in and— actually, he'd been unreal to watch, like something out of a fairy tale. He'd been even faster than the nekkers, and his silver sword had cut through them like they were barely even there.

Lambert shook his head and scowled. And now the Witcher knew that he wanted to escape, and was probably still mad at him over the first attempt, and—

“Hey, Lambert. You awake?” the Witcher asked.

Lambert wondered if he could fool the Witcher. Probably not. And it probably wasn’t worth making him even angrier. He pulled the blankets back and sat up, wincing as his stomach throbbed.

“How are you feeling, kid?” the Witcher asked.

Lambert really wasn’t sure what the best way to answer that would be.

After a moment of silence the Witcher's expression changed, a little, and he held out a bag roughly the size of both his fists. "How about you have something to eat while I check your leg, okay?"

Lambert took the bag very cautiously while sticking out his bandaged leg. He opened it as the Witcher took his ankle again. The bag contained an assortment of dried fruits, vegetables, and mushrooms, and even some hazelnuts.

“It’s not quite the same as a hot breakfast, but it does well enough,” the Witcher said, while examining the claw marks on Lambert’s leg. “These look pretty good, but I have some liniment and some bruise balm that are safe for you to use, and that’ll help with how sore you probably are.”

Lambert, mouth full of boletus, could only stare at the Witcher.

The Witcher’s lips twitched again, but he turned and pulled out several jars and more bandaging from his saddlebags. “I’ll have to get your face and maybe your back for you.”

Lambert nodded slowly, trying to figure out what was happening. The Witcher dug out a couple of fingers’ worth of sharp-smelling balm and slowly reached for Lambert’s face. Lambert kept very still as the Witcher gently smeared the balm around his eyes and cheek. It was cool and it tingled, just a little. It did feel good on the bruises.

"Good to keep going?" the Witcher asked.

Lambert twitched. He'd have to take off his jacket and shirt for the Witcher to get at his other bruises, and Zdena was still in there. He couldn't—

The Witcher looked confused for a moment before his expression cleared.

"Ah. Don't want me to see the toy your mom packed?" he asked, and Lambert heard roaring in his ears.

“—hey, Lambert, it’s okay!” he heard the Witcher say. He made himself look at the Witcher again.

“Really, kid. I promise I don’t care. As long as it’s not hurting anyone, you can do what you like, and that includes having whatever toys you want. Life’s too short to let people shame you about your choices.” the Witcher looked at him for another moment. “Want me to turn around so you don’t have to show me?”

Lambert nodded sharply before he could stop himself, but the Witcher just— turned around. Unless he had literal eyes in the back of his head, he wouldn’t be able to see Lambert.

_Don’t just sit there waiting for him to turn back around, **move!**_

Lambert put the bag of food down and stripped off his jacket and shirt as quickly as he dared, making sure Zdena was carefully tucked out of view. He then half-sat on the whole bundle, just to make sure the Witcher couldn’t sneak a look.

“You done?” the Witcher asked after he stopped shifting.

“Yeah,” Lambert said.

The Witcher turned back around and whistled quietly as he looked at Lambert.

“What,” Lambert snapped, uncomfortable.

“That is a very impressive bruise there,” the Witcher said, gesturing at Lambert’s midsection.

Lambert folded an arm over it. "So what?" he asked.

"How old is it?" the Witcher asked.

"Why do you want to know?"

"So I know if you need more medical attention than just the balm," the Witcher said.

"Three days," Lambert said. "It's been getting better."

“Well, if it stops or starts getting worse, tell me,” the Witcher said. “You can keep eating, I’m just going to keep at it.”

As long as he wasn’t holding the Witcher up by eating, he might as well. Lambert started back in on the food as the Witcher started smearing balm over the bruises on his torso. He hissed a little as the Witcher poked him in the stomach while going over the bruise.

“Sorry,” the Witcher said. “Didn’t mean to do that. You all right?”

“Fine,” Lambert grumbled. The pain was already fading.

The Witcher looked at him for a moment, then kept going, gentler than before. Lambert took another mouthful of his breakfast. They would probably start moving when the Witcher was done, so it was best for Lambert to eat while he could.

"I have some liniment that helps with sore muscles, too," the Witcher said. “You can put it on if you want, or I can do it.”

Lambert considered that for a couple of moments. If the Witcher was still busy, Lambert could keep eating— but if the Witcher was expecting Lambert to take over, he might get mad.

“I’m not sure—” he said, finally. It would have earned him a cuff from his father, at the very least, but the Witcher was definitely working on different rules, even if Lambert hadn’t quite figured them out yet.

He thought he saw something flash in the Witcher’s eyes, but the man just said calmly, “Probably better for me to do it, then.”

Lambert eyed him for a moment, but shrugged out of his trousers. It was easier than just pushing them up his legs, anyway. He kept eating as the Witcher quietly explained his way through using the liniment on Lambert. It wasn’t really different from the way his mom had used balms or the like, but it was also clearly working as an excuse for now. Plus, he was a little less sore when the Witcher was done, so he had that on top of extra food; to his shame, one of the better mornings that he could remember, at least physically.

“Mouth doing okay?” the Witcher asked, finally, having apparently finished with everything else. Lambert couldn’t help feeling a little goggle-eyed. 

He nodded, slowly. It actually was. It was still kind of sore, but it wasn’t nearly as sharp a pain when he accidentally poked it anymore.

“That’s good. I still have to get Adder saddled and loaded before we can get moving,” the Witcher said, and packed away the jars before picking up the saddlebags and the saddle. Lambert took another large mouthful of food while he could and scrambled back into his clothes and off the bedroll while the Witcher was looking away. Zdena was tucked securely back under his shirt by the time the man turned around again.

The Witcher came back over and stowed away the bedroll as well before snuffing the remains of the fire with a gesture.

“Time to get moving,” he said, and walked with Lambert over to the horse, who made a friendly sound at him and demanded some petting, before giving him a boost up into the saddle.

Lambert winced a little; the horse was _wide_ , and though the liniment had helped he was still pretty sore.

“Sorry, kid. If you want you can walk a bit later, but right now I want to get out of here in case any necrophages come sniffing around.”

He’d said that last night. Lambert debated for a long moment as the Witcher started leading the horse north again, then asked, “necrophages?”

“Ah. A general category of monsters; they eat things that are already dead, that’s what the name means. It’s a two-part word, made up of two smaller ones; ‘necro’ means death or dead things, and ‘phage’ is eats, in an old language that’s mostly studied by healers, mages, and scholars.”

“And Witchers?” Lambert dared to venture.

The Witcher chuckled. “Only a little. I certainly don’t break it out for every flower or beast, but it can be useful. Definitely a lot shorter than saying ‘monsters that eat corpses’, at least if other people understand what you mean by it.”

Lambert shifted a little. His dad always called him stupid, but it didn’t seem fair that he was expected to know what he meant when he never explained it. Mom explained things and he remembered them, next time, but he didn’t know if the Witcher would be angry if he asked for explanations.

The Witcher looked back at him from where he was leading the horse. “Any more questions for me?”

Lambert bit his tongue for a minute, but decided to press his luck, a bit. “Nekkers aren’t necrophages, then? Since I wasn’t dead, I mean.”

“Ah!” the Witcher said, actually smiling. “You’re right. They aren’t necrophages, and good job on trying to reason it out. The thing is, though, that necrophages pretty commonly attack humans.”

Lambert felt stung. “But then why—? Other monsters eat people, sometimes, right?”

“They do! But necrophages prefer to eat _old_ corpses, not ones fresh-made, and that’s what the name is referencing. The thing is, some of them get protective of their territory or food source—which becomes a big problem when that space is the town graveyard, say—or some, like drowners, kill people and then store the corpses until they get rotten enough to eat. Sometimes, too, if there are a lot of necrophages or a lot of corpses, like on a fresh battlefield, they’ll go into a frenzy and start attacking anything that gets in sight.”

Lambert pondered this for a minute. “Do they… do they have babies that they protect, too?” The hens had always been particularly nasty when they were hatching chicks.

“Some of them do! And even the ones that don’t care for their young, like rotfiends, can cause a ton of problems for people just reproducing.”

That was interesting, but Lambert had a more pressing question. “So what are nekkers, then?”

“They’re ogroids, or at least that’s what we call them. Same as giants, cyclopses, and trolls. Actually, ogroids are kind of interesting, most of them are semi-sapient, as far as we can tell, and trolls—at least non-rabid ones—are definitely sapient, if generally a little stupid.” The Witcher looked at Lambert again. “Sapient means they can think like people do, generally, instead of like most other animals. You can actually reason with rock trolls, most of the time.”

“So they kinda think like people do?” Lambert said, a little disgusted. “But why—”

The Witcher sighed. “That’s the thing, kid; we don’t know, and as far as we can tell they’ve never tried explaining it to us. Nekkers in particular are vicious little bastards, and since they’ve never made the effort to not tear to shreds anyone in reach, we can only return their attitude in kind.”

All of this made for a lot to think about, and furthermore Lambert felt like he should really stop while he was ahead. He’d known that elves and dwarves and halflings and gnomes existed, even if he’d only ever seen a part-elven trader, but there was a difference between knowing that there were people who weren’t human and knowing that there were monsters that thought like people did. Hell, even that monsters claimed territory or made stores of food or looked after their young like animals did was a startling concept—the few times he’d heard anyone talk about them, they’d been categorized as mindless beasts that just viciously attacked anyone or anything in sight.

He also still had no idea where the Witcher’s limits were, and he didn’t want to run across them, especially when he was being so eerily nice despite what had happened last night. He let the conversation lapse, and focused on identifying plants he could see from his seat on the horse instead of thinking about monsters and wanting to ask more questions. Maybe if the Witcher was still in a good mood tomorrow he could ask a few more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus is born another monster nerd.
> 
> HEY! HEY GUESS WHAT LAURELNOSE ON TUMBLR _MADE **F A N A R T**_ OH MY GOD IT LOOKS SO! GOOD!! https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/620118843352891392/lambert-stared-down-at-him-clearly-untrusting
> 
> Also, I am shamelessly adopting his headcanon that rotfiends reproduce like nererids (BEWARE GROSSNESS AND EXPLODING ANIMALS, NO REALLY) https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/619960693056225280/ok-so-i-know-some-of-the-monster-nests-in-tw3  
> It’s so disgusting and so perfect, and I suspect adult Lambert refuses to do that shit unless the situation is truly dire (he will, however, offer to poison the water to kill all the larval? rotfiends)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did someone say worldbuilding?

“Let's go through my supplies and I'll show you what's safe and what you shouldn't touch," the Witcher said that evening, after he’d gone over the horse again, detailing what he was doing aloud, and started a fire.

"I'm good at plants," Lambert said, a little offended.

"I believe you, but it's not only plants in there and I don’t want you accidentally getting hurt," the Witcher said.

"Fine," Lambert said. He was even more exhausted than he had been last night, but he should be able to keep track. He was good at this kind of thing.

The Witcher watched him for a moment, and Lambert shifted uncomfortably. 

"I'll keep it fairly quick tonight," the Witcher said, and pulled out a large case from the saddlebags. He opened it, and it turned out to be multilayered and absolutely full of little bottles. "The most important point is that you shouldn't be digging around in this case. None of these are at all safe for a human. There are some infused oils in here too, don't touch those either. Basically, if it's in glass, don't mess with it."

Lambert frowned and looked at the little bottles, lined up snug in leather spacers cushioned with bits of dried grass. There were a _lot_ of them. "Why do you have them, then?" he asked.

"I'm not human," the Witcher said. "So they don't kill me. They do things for me; help me heal, keep me going longer, that sort of thing. We can go over which does what another night, if you’re interested."

Lambert nodded, glad that he didn't have to try and focus on memorizing just now.

The Witcher closed the case and pulled out a much smaller pouch. This contained the jars the Witcher had used on him that morning, and a couple more, five in total—four made of different-colored wood with carefully sealed lids, and one much larger one that had a cork. 

"These are safe for humans. The lightest-colored one is for scars, medium for skin irritation, dark for bruises. Reddish is burns. And the largest with the cork is the liniment,” he said, and put those to the side. “As far as components, if you’re not _absolutely_ sure of what it is or if it’s in a glass bottle, leave it alone. I carry a lot of dangerous stuff, and one of those is an alcohol I use as a base; there’s distillations in there with otherwise completely normal ingredients that could still kill you because of the steeping liquid.”

“Don’t touch the glass bottles or anything I’m not completely sure of,” Lambert repeated. “I got it.”

“And if you want to know, I’ll go over what they do later, and what’s in them,” the Witcher said.

Lambert nodded and stifled a yawn.

“Ah, well. If you want to nap until I'm back from hunting and got food cooked you can do that," the Witcher said. "I suggest using these two everywhere you can reach first, though." He indicated the bruise balm and the liniment.

Lambert nodded a second time, and watched a little blearily as the Witcher headed off.

“I’ll be within earshot, yell if you need me,” he said.

Lambert wondered if the Witcher was trying to see if he would run away again. He still _wanted_ to go home, wanted it desperately, but he would have to be a fool to run off now, even more sore than he was yesterday, with a leg injury, with an ever-greater distance to travel, and with the Witcher already alerted. That was just _begging_ for a punishment of some kind. Instead, he made use of the two jars, guessing at his black eyes and contorting a bit to get some of the bruises on his back, before capping and repacking them, first in their pouch and then in the saddlebags.

He considered the bedroll, but he wasn’t sure that he wanted to sleep with the Witcher not in eyesight. 

_Although, if I just lay down, and don’t close my eyes—_

He woke to the Witcher’s hand on his shoulder. He maybe started a little, but he caught the scent of roasted meat and relaxed a bit.

“Food’s ready,” the Witcher said.

Food turned out to be a large bird and some greens, roasted in the pot the Witcher had. The Witcher handed Lambert an entire leg and started in on the other one himself. Lambert wasn’t used to having meat, and the bird was wonderfully tender, with a crispy skin and flesh much less tough than the bits of the chickens he’d gotten—he ate ravenously, making sure he didn’t leave anything on the bones.

The Witcher tossed the bones into the fire when he was finished with his leg and Lambert followed suit. The Witcher kept handing him more food until Lambert, feeling almost uncomfortably full, shook his head at the latest offering; the Witcher nodded and finished off the rest. Lambert was a little concerned as he watched the Witcher leave basically nothing behind, but the man had handed him everything he'd eaten—Lambert hadn't tried for anything that the Witcher had claimed.

The Witcher started cleaning his pot and Lambert sat there feeling useless and nervous. He couldn’t help a twitch when the Witcher looked up.

“You don’t have to stay up and watch me if you’d rather get to sleep,” the Witcher said. 

“I—” Lambert started, then stopped and thought about what he wanted to say. “Shouldn’t I help?”

“I’ve been doing this by myself for a long time,” the Witcher said. “Not to mention, I’m interested in teaching you new things, not just making you do the washing-up when you could use more sleep.”

Lambert decided to take the dismissal, and went back over to the Witcher’s bedroll. Between his full stomach and the warmth of the fire, he was asleep again in a matter of minutes.

He woke up again some time later needing to relieve himself. It was almost pitch-black, apart from a low glow from the embers of the fire, so it was still the middle of the night.

He’d finished, just far enough away that he could still see the glow of the fire, and was walking back when he saw the flash of a night-animal’s eyes near the camp. He froze, torn between hoping the whatever-it-was hadn’t sensed him yet and just scrambling up the nearest tree and hoping he was fast enough that it wouldn’t catch him.

_The Witcher where was the Witcher—_

Sparks flew and a new flame caught on a piece of wood on the fire, and Lambert saw the eyes belonged to a large humanoid lump—and then he saw the silhouette of swords on the back of the figure and his brain ground to a halt.

“Lambert?” 

Yes, that was the Witcher. Or at least it sounded just like him.

“What’s the problem, kid?” the shape asked again.

The eyes were pointed right at him. It wasn’t as if it—he?—couldn’t see him.

Lambert swallowed a few times and managed to croak out, “Eyes.”

“Oh.”

The fire was built up a little more, and Lambert could see the Witcher, or something that looked like him, was kneeling right by it.

“It’s all right, kid. My eyes are a little different. Helps me see in the dark,” and okay that was definitely the Witcher there. 

Lambert crept back over to the bedroll, feeling a little embarrassed and very alert. Up close, it became pretty obvious that the eerie glow was just light from the fire reflecting strangely off the Witcher’s eyes.

“Were you awake?” Lambert asked. If he was keeping the Witcher from getting sleep—

“Meditating,” the Witcher said. “I heard you get up. Sorry I freaked you out.”

The Witcher had _heard_ him? He hadn’t heard Lambert last night—but last night Lambert hadn’t tried to run once already. The Witcher was paying close attention, now.

 _And he can see in the dark_ , Lambert realized. _I’m not going to be able to sneak away in the night._

That thought smashed into him like being hit upside the head. That option just—wasn’t on the table anymore. If he was going to try and get away, it would need to be in a group of people. And finding a group of people who would be willing to protect him from a Witcher, people who could or would help him back home—that seemed so unrealistic as to be pretty much impossible.

He was stuck with this. He wasn’t going back home. 

It didn’t feel real.

Lambert fell asleep again trying to come to terms with it.

* * *

The bag of dried food made another appearance the next morning.

"We're going to have to live rough until we hit Ellander," the Witcher said, sounding almost apologetic, as he packed it away and they started out.

That jogged something in Lambert's memory.

"Isn't that where the Temple of Melitele is?" he asked. He'd heard some of the village women talking about it, once.

"It is; the main temple, anyway, where the high priestess is. The priestesses have a school there, and I know a few of them; you can stay there while I earn some money and buy some provisions."

The Witcher was giving Lambert an odd look, one Lambert didn't know how to interpret. He turned over what the Witcher had said in his head. A school—well, he wasn’t going there to learn, obviously, but priestesses—weren’t they supposed to be good people? Would they listen if he told them he wanted to go back to his mom? On the other hand, if they would, then why was the Witcher taking him there? To see if he would try to escape again? If he knew some of the priestesses, that might be it—they wouldn’t let him, and the Witcher would hear about it. At the same time, that seemed a little stupid; there were all sorts of things the Witcher could have punished him over, why would he be waiting for a _second_ escape attempt?

Lambert shook his head a little, putting the question aside for the moment.

“How long?” he asked.

“Until we get there? Another day, two at the maximum. Staying there?” the Witcher made a face and wavered his hand, palm-down. “Perhaps three days, depending on what people need done.”

“And if there aren’t any monsters that need killing?” Lambert asked curiously.

The Witcher laughed. “In a city like Ellander, there’s always someone having some kind of problem. If I get really desperate, I can see what the prince is paying per head for drowners.”

Lambert was a little confused, and it must have shown on his face, because the Witcher explained.

“Drowners are _mostly_ just a nuisance. There’s almost never official contracts out for them, because unless they’re being led by some other stronger creature, or unless there’s a sudden population explosion, they can be mostly controlled with caution and enough crossbow bolts. So, near larger cities, instead of contracts there’s usually an amount that local nobility or guard garrisons will pay per head, to encourage population control. It’s not usually very much, also partly because encouraging peasants to go out and get killed trying for good money isn’t what they’re after, but it’s reliable scut work for us monster slayers.”

Lambert had to think about that for a while. “But why offer money to other people if a guard garrison can deal with it?”

“Because if they had the guards killing drowners they’d have to pay them more than they can offer to us,” the Witcher said.

“But why do you do it then?” Lambert asked. “I mean, uh.”

“No, I understand. Not all of us do, and definitely not all the time. But if you can keep from getting actually hurt doing it, it’s still a source of money, and if the outskirts are having trouble with drowners but can’t get them culled, sometimes the person in charge will set the price higher, or you can convince them to pay more. There was a whole fiasco a decade or so ago where Aedirn tried to enforce a mandatory maximum for heads, at less than half of what basically anyone else offered.” The Witcher looked pained. “Fuck that was an ugly year. Bloody-minded fool.”

Lambert tilted his head, not understanding.

The Witcher looked at him. “Witchers stopped hunting drowners until Aedirn recanted. It took the bastard an entire _fucking_ year before he struck the law.”

Lambert’s jaw dropped. That was power on a level he’d never thought about before. If he or his mother had ever stopped doing what his dad said, his dad would have just beaten them until they did what he told them. But Witchers had stopped doing a thing and they’d _won_.

“Less people died than might have, thank whatever common sense exists. His nobles weren’t completely crazy, they sent out patrols. But, of course, that was more expensive than just letting bounties stay where they’d been originally, and they started throwing fits. If he’d kept it going he might have seen open rebellion.”

“And you—” Lambert isn’t sure how to phrase it, “got _away_ with that?”

The Witcher peered at him. “How do you mean ‘got away with’?”

Lambert gestured a little. “They didn’t, hurt you or punish you for it?”

“I won’t say people weren’t upset, but when prices were discretionary again a bunch of Witchers went in and cleared out most of the local bodies of water, and I know we didn’t claim payment for everything we killed. That cleared up a lot of the bad feelings.” The Witcher looked a little grim. “We don’t want people to die, and it’s not fair to the peasants, but if we don’t get paid fairly for our work we’re going to get killed when our tools or our bodies fail.”

“But they didn’t try to— attack you when you were in Aedirn and not killing drowners?” Lambert asked.

The Witcher made an expression Lambert didn’t quite understand. “Well, if they’d actually tried, we would have quit Aedirn entirely. Trying actively to kill us on a kingdom-wide scale isn’t something to stick around for. It is possible that a couple of individual Witchers were attacked, but we’re pretty hard to kill, at least when it comes to humans trying to do it.”

Lambert nodded slowly. It still seemed almost unbelievable, but he didn't _think_ the Witcher was lying. The thought that people could _make_ other people treat them fairly, or mostly anyway… required some thought.

The Witcher seemed to realize Lambert was thinking hard, because he let the conversation lapse as they continued moving. The quiet remained for most of the rest of the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Support unions* guys.
> 
> *Police unions are not that kind of union, because police are an authority and not a group of workers. Authority figures don't need more to back them up.
> 
> (Next chapter: more Jorik POV!)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out chapter 8 is going to be from Jorik’s POV too, whoops. Couldn’t resist the chance to write some of what my favorite parts of Witcher 3 were (namely, investigating!)
> 
> Also, I don't think we ever get any confirmation on what priestesses of Melitele are called, so I went with 'Sister' for convenience.

Jorik couldn’t help being a touch grateful that the Temple of Melitele wasn’t quite in Ellander proper. Even in places where folk were used to Witchers, a Witcher traveling with a child tended to attract attention of the bad kind. He’d never heard of one being attacked in a large city, but if he was going to earn enough money to provision the two of them for a trip back to Kaer Morhen, it would be much easier if people weren’t being reminded of where, exactly, Witchers came from.

The sun was setting as they walked through the temple gates, the light turning the white exterior of the buildings gold. Novices and Sisters walked through the courtyards on their way to the evening meal. A couple looked their way, curious, but unless they recognized the two swords in silhouette they probably wouldn’t be able to tell he was a Witcher, backed by the sun as he was.

“Jorik!” a familiar voice called, and as Jorik turned to look he was swept up in a hug.

“Nenneke!” he said, surprised. The last he’d seen her, the dark-brown-skinned part-elven woman had been at the Temple in Kaedwen. “What are you doing here?”

She pulled back and looked wryly at him. “The Sister in charge of the gardens here in Ellander—Sister Marrin—decided it was time to start training an apprentice. Sister Iolla sent me along, she knows how well I do with plants, and Sister Marrin decided to keep me.”

“That’s wonderful,” Jorik said, genuinely pleased. “We Wolves will all miss you, of course—”

Nenneke snorted slightly. “You will, all you rough-and-tumble lads. But I can do more here.”

Unsaid, of course, was ‘for the arrangement between the Temple and the Witchers’. The Temple wasn’t an orphanage—they just didn’t have the resources or capability to be. But they did take in children, usually for a fee, to teach or to train to be servants or teachers for the temple or for rich people in the city, as healers, or as potential novices. And the Witchers, well. There were always children given to them by people of the Continent or found by Witchers on the Path who could not become Witchers themselves, either biologically or because of a major disability or a temperament that was completely unsuited. So the Temple would take them and make sure they had as good a life as they could provide, and if a Temple or Sister ever needed a Witcher’s aid, within the scope of one’s usual duties, they would have it at no charge. Witchers also sold the Temple a specific lifesaving medicine that was difficult for most people to create, the necessary ingredients being dangerous for normal people to collect, for next to nothing, and a Witcher could usually get superb medical aid from any of the priestesses if they needed it.

And so, with anti-Witcher sentiment rising, it was a good time to make sure the arrangement was as solid as they could make it. A priestess who knew and worked with Witchers on a regular basis being elevated to such a position as head of the gardens at the main Temple in Ellander was only to the good.

Nenneke peered over Jorik’s shoulder. 

“Now who’s this lad?” she asked.

“His name is Lambert,” Jorik said, and added, much quieter, “my Surprise Child.”

Nenneke looked at him in mild surprise.

“I was hoping there would be space for him here, while I do some work in the city,” Jorik continued, before dropping his voice again. “If he can easily be something other than a Witcher, I want to find out now.”

Nenneke nodded, pursing her lips slightly. “I can take him to see the Sister in charge of the children. I don’t have time to hear the full story now, but I want to later this evening, before you head out on any contracts,” she said quietly.

“Fair and more than fair,” Jorik said with a smile, then turned to Lambert. “Lambert, this is Nenneke. She’s a friend, and she’ll take you to see the Sister who’ll be looking after you while I’m busy, okay?”

Lambert was giving Nenneke a look that boiled down to utter suspicion. Nenneke in turn looked at Jorik out of the corner of her eye with a raised eyebrow.

 _Shit._ He mouthed the word ‘abused’ at her and her expression smoothed out.

“Hello, Lambert,” she said to the kid. “You’re just in time for the evening meal, actually.”

Lambert perked up a little at the mention of food, as expected.

"And I'll head into the city proper and find some work," Jorik said, keeping an eye on the kid for his reaction. He looked torn for a moment, but nodded, and Jorik helped him down from Adder.

“Will you be needing Adder?” Nenneke asked Jorik, and he shook his head. "You can put her in the stable, then. I'll take her saddlebags to safe storage from there."

“Thank you, Nenneke,” Jorik said, then turned to the kid. “I may not see you for a couple of days; monster hunts in cities usually involve a lot of investigative work, and that always takes forever. But I _will_ come back, okay?”

That may not have been the best thing to say; the kid probably would be perfectly happy if Jorik disappeared and never came back, given everything. Hell, if this took as long as he thought it would, Lambert would be spending as much time with the Sisters as he had with Jorik. Even so, Jorik didn’t _want_ to leave the kid without a reassurance that he’d see at least a slightly familiar face again.

He felt a little better about it when Lambert met his eyes and nodded, firmly, before allowing Nenneke to lead him off. Jorik turned and led Adder over to the stables. He saw to her care and told the head stablehand that Nenneke would be picking up his saddlebags later, to make sure they would find their way into her custody, then exited the temple grounds for the city of Ellander.

* * *

When Jorik arrived back at the Temple that evening, he asked the Sister at the main door where he could find Nenneke. The woman looked at him a little disapprovingly, but pointed him to one of the smaller buildings on the temple grounds.

It turned out the building was sleeping quarters for a number of the slightly higher-ranked Sisters of Melitele—Nenneke actually had a small cell to herself here, instead of sharing an open dormitory with other priestesses.

“We’ll have to keep the door cracked open,” she said, a little apologetically, as she welcomed him in. “Temple politics. For all of the teachings of Melitele on sex and sexual relationships, there’s far too many Sisters who would like to ruin my reputation with some ridiculous accusation about having slept with half the Witchers on the Continent.”

Jorik shook his head, a little amused. “I can’t imagine anyone finding the time for that, even a professional. Any prohibitions on wine?” He punctuated the statement by holding up a bottle of rough Toussaint red he’d earned helping a merchant carry a few cases to her wagon from her stall. She'd been rather pretty and hadn't been nervous of him, which had been most of the inspiration to help, but the wine was an excellent reward.

“Not if it’s watered well enough,” Nenneke said, taking out two simple glazed cups and a pitcher. “Will you want any?”

“Let me see what it tastes like on its own, first,” Jorik said, uncorking the bottle.

Nenneke nodded and filled her own cup two-thirds of the way with water.

After they’d gotten settled and had a few sips of the wine—it turned out to be not bad, so Jorik had declined to add water—Nenneke fixed him with a stare.

“So,” she said, keeping her voice down. “You. With a Child Surprise.”

Jorik leaned back in the chair and groaned. “I didn’t think the man would have anyone willing to put up with him,” he said, conscious of the open door himself. “More fool I, clearly. And once his father tried to hit him, in _front_ of me— I couldn’t just leave him there.”

“Understandable,” Nenneke said, taking a drink. “He’s not particularly trusting, which makes sense.”

“Yeah,” Jorik said, grimacing and taking a drink himself. “I thought he might do better with women than with men, given he clearly loved his mother and didn’t want to leave her, but…”

Nenneke set her cup down on the table with a click. “ _Or_ he’s not prepared to trust someone that the person who took him away from his mother is friends with, Jorik.”

“Shit. You’re probably right,” Jorik said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“There was no other option?” Nenneke asked him.

Jorik sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know. Not once I’d showed up after claiming the Law, certainly. I’m sure she was doing her best for the kid, but the bastard had clearly been hitting them both for quite some time. And this is the nearest Temple, and short of killing the man myself—”

They both drank for a little while in silence. When his cup was empty, Nenneke took the bottle to fill it again. 

“Do you think the lad isn’t suited to being a Witcher?” she asked as she poured.

Jorik took a sip as he thought of how to say it. 

“I think he would be an excellent Witcher,” he said. “But he’s— you _know_ , mostly none of us apart from the Masters interact with the Bastion boys.”

“Emotional attachment,” Nenneke agreed.

Jorik sighed. “Exactly. And I’m _responsible_ for him. If I take him to Kaer Morhen without trying to give him another option and he dies—”

“Mm,” Nenneke hummed, her eyes warm over the rim of her cup.

Jorik pulled a face at her, without any real heat.

"Well," she said, brushing her fingers over his hand in a familiar gesture, "you take a couple of days with your contracts and we'll see if Lambert fits in here."

"Thank you, Nenneke," Jorik said, clinking their cups together gently.

Their talk moved onto other things, but eventually Nenneke shooed him, empty bottle in hand, out of her cell so she could sleep. Jorik stretched, pleasantly aware of a certain easing of tension in his shoulders, and went to go find the Sister in charge of directing pilgrims to find out where he could sleep for the night.

* * *

The next morning, after having collected his saddlebags from Nenneke, Jorik set out into Ellander to gather more information on the three local contracts he’d thought were offering enough money to make them potentially worthwhile. He’d much prefer to avoid the one about something in the sewers; there wasn’t enough information in the written posting to determine if the problem was a zeugl or something that would be less of a pain in the ass, and Jorik wasn’t about to take a chance unless he had to. Between the other two, the purported haunting would probably be the less dangerous to investigate and solve—no deaths so far, unlike whatever was leaving the occasional shredded corpse in the streets. He could take care of the haunting today, ideally, then move on to the killer. Not to mention if he talked to the guard about the nighttime deaths they would probably want to know if he would look into the sewers as well, and it would be easier to turn them down if he could claim he was on a tight schedule.

Decision made, he turned towards the inn where the contract issuer had said he could be found. The Northerner was a little surprised to see a Witcher answering his notice, but amiable enough, at least comparatively.

“I just purchased the property, see,” he said, after introductions were through. “The owner had been leasing it for a time but when his last tenants moved out he decided to sell. I wonder that they may have been chased away by the haunting too, and he couldn’t find anyone else who would rent.”

Jorik inclined his head a bit, encouraging the man to go on.

“So we close the sale and I move my things in, very start of spring. It’s a touch cramped, but it’s an _ownership_ , and not a rental, and that’s honestly enough for me. Except, not too long after moving in, I get this, feeling, like. As if someone was watching me. There’s not really space for someone to watch from, so I just wrote it off, for a while. But then I started hearing things— whispers I couldn’t make out, something like the wind, and the feeling like being watched didn’t go away. And I just—started dreading coming home. T’was so much I felt like I could barely breathe.” The man paused for a moment and looked at the table. “It seemed stupid, honestly. Nothing to attach it to, just whispers and dread. But then— I woke one morning, and there was a picture scrawled on the wall. Eyes and some kind of symbol. I took a room here immediately and went to have the contract written up that evening, after work.”

Jorik nodded, turning things over in his head. That actually sounded like it could be a wraith—possibly even the early stages of a penitent, depending on the symbol.

“Can you give me directions from here? And may I have the key?” he asked the man, and received both in short order.

Several minutes later, he was standing in the little alley outside the house, hand on his medallion and frowning. No magic or monsters that he could detect currently, which argued against a true haunting.

He opened the door and started searching. The house was small and close, without many windows, but it was cozy enough; there was a good sized hearth for warmth and cooking on the main floor, plenty of space for lamps, and a sniff suggested the owner had a small charcoal brazier upstairs to warm the bedroom. A deeper breath brought only normal scents to him; a bit of dust, oil from the lamps, the charcoal, food scents, nothing that suggested death.

A careful search of the ground floor revealed nothing that seemed odd or out of place; no cellar doors, no secret rooms or bricked-up doorways. The stairs didn’t behave as though there were anything under them but the usual frame, and lacking other evidence he wasn’t going to tear them up.

There _was_ an image on the wall of the bedroom on the second floor, but it wasn’t in the supernatural glyphs of a penitent. This was charcoal, with a crude rendition of eyes surrounding what might have been a stick figure in a house. Jorik squinted at it, fingers brushing against his medallion. Nothing. Another deep breath revealed no new scents either; not even those of another human near the wall.

Jorik huffed in irritation but went over the entire room anyway. By the time it was over he could feel a headache developing.

_Except—_

He frowned, and took a deep breath, not paying attention to the scents in the air but his own body’s reaction. Something felt strange. He didn’t feel quite like he’d gotten a proper breath. That was—

On a hunch, he headed outside and stood a ways away from the house, just standing and breathing for a few minutes. His headache and breathing eased.

“...Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone who deduces what’s up from just the chapter content gets a big thumbs up! (chapter 8 should be written in, at maximum, a week)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to your health and safety PSA: the ‘haunting’ was absolutely inspired by the one legendary reddit ask where it turned out the OP was having hallucinations and memory problems due to serious carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide is absolutely one possible explanation for things like fits of paranoia or purported paranormal activity (black mold is another one, and that’s a major health risk too!), so if you’re having odd experiences please check for mundane-but-potentially-deadly explanations as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_postit_notes_left_in_apartment/
> 
> Also no Jorik’s not giving a perfect comparison but he’s more concerned with convincing the guy that this is both mundane AND dangerous.

Jorik had to spend a half hour debating what exactly he wanted to do about the ‘haunting’. Ultimately, it was the other two contracts that tipped him; he wasn’t going to be letting the kid down if he got the full pay from both of those. Decision made, he returned to the homeowner.

“You’re back!” the man said. “Do you have news?”

“I do,” Jorik said, a little grimly.

The man looked concerned. “I hope it’s not bad?”

“It depends on how you classify bad. Look, have you ever seen the aftermath of a large fire? Specifically, the bodies that are unmarked by flame?”

The man was a little horrified, but he nodded.

“There are a number of things that a person can breathe in that aren’t good for them. One is given off from charcoal burning, and it’s worse in small spaces without adequate windows or other airflow. It makes people paranoid, affects the memory, makes it hard to breathe, can even cause people to hear things that aren’t there. Eventually, it can cause death.”

The man wasn’t stupid; Jorik could see it dawn on him. 

“That’s what’s going on at my house,” he said, worried.

“It is, or something very like it,” Jorik said. “The best way to fix it would be to have some windows cut and the chimney checked, and to not use that brazier of yours, especially while you’re sleeping. I would recommend asking the Temple about workers who could fix it safely, it hasn’t dispersed enough yet for a regular crew.”

The man blanched, almost certainly imagining the cost.

“I’ll take a sixth of what you were offering,” Jorik said, with an internal wince. “Only fair; I couldn’t actually fix your problem, just tell you what it was.”

The man’s jaw visibly dropped. “I— Master Witcher, you—”

Jorik held up a hand, which thankfully cut the man off. “Just— promise you’ll get it fixed, please.”

Of course,” the man said. “None else would even take me seriously, I’ll not disregard your advice.”

He fumbled at his purse for the coin, which Jorik accepted with at least an attempt at a friendly nod. 

Once Jorik was a little ways away from the inn, he took a moment to center himself. It was stupid getting worked up over what amounted to three hours and change’s worth of work for sixteen orens. Hell, he wouldn’t have even been _annoyed_ if he didn’t have other obligations. Except, of course, he did, and now he was definitely going to have to deal with the sewer monster. Damn.

He pointed Adder’s nose to the main guardhouse and set off, resigned.

“Witcher,” one of the guards said as he approached.

Jorik nodded. “I have two contracts here; came to ask for some more details,” he said, holding up the two sheets of parchment.

“You’ll want to speak to Captain Aldis for that,” the man said. “He’s an office on the second floor.”

“Thank you,” Jorik said. He brought Adder over to the hitching post, stroked her muzzle a few times and quietly told her she was a good girl, and walked into the building. It was fairly dim inside, at least by human standards, and Jorik adjusted his eyes a bit until he could see as well as he did outside. Most of the first floor was a large communal space, with long benches and tables set up along one side of it. The space smelled like sweat, metal, leather, various oils, and ale, with a few hints of mud and blood; not too different from any other guardhouse Jorik had been in. Several off-duty guards had looked up when he came in; Jorik nodded at them and proceeded up the stairs.

There were indeed a couple of offices on the second floor. Thankfully the door was open to one where a white Northerner with Captain’s insignia sat with a small pile of papers and a pen.

“Captain Aldis?” Jorik asked.

“Hm?” the man said, looking up. “Ah. A Witcher. Here about the contracts, are you?”

“That I am,” Jorik said, striding in.

“Well,” Captain Aldis said. “I’ve some information written up, for whoever wanted to take the contracts, and a map as well.”

Jorik was pleasantly surprised—usually people weren’t this organized, even guardsmen.

“I’m afraid all we have for the sewer problem is a count of the work crews who went missing and the areas they were supposed to be in when they did,” the captain continued. “It’s dangerous enough down there at the best of times, nobody wanted to investigate, and the crews are refusing to work until someone takes care of whatever’s down there. The Prince is furious, of course.”

Jorik nodded, thinking a little wryly that it might well have been for the best that the haunting was a bust—he probably wouldn’t have gotten out of Captain Aldis’ office without the sewer contract anyway.

“As for the other killer—” the man put a couple of sheets of paper down in front of Jorik. “The first has the locations and dates for the street killer. After the second body turned up I ordered that all the corpses be preserved—they’re in storage at the city’s morgue. I’ll write you a chit so they’ll let you see them.”

Jorik glanced at the papers and frowned. “The contract only mentioned five bodies?” he asked. The top paper had eleven notes on it.

“Aye,” the captain said, grimly. “Only five bodies we’ve found. But there’ve been another six spots where my men have come across too much blood to have been from a man still living, and no signs of mugging or other human violence. Those are on there as well.”

Jorik hummed thoughtfully, looking at the other papers. One was a map of the city, and the other was information on the sewer work crews.

"Have you any questions, Master Witcher?" Captain Aldis asked.

Jorik looked up from the papers. "You've covered the initial round very well, actually. If I do have some more after viewing the bodies—?"

"I'm on shift until one of the morning," the captain said. "Beyond that, one of my sergeants will be in—Eddin has the night shift until nine in the morn, and Sala has nine until five." He scribbled on a scrap of paper and pushed it across his desk to Jorik.

"Understood, thank you," Jorik said, taking the scrap—it was the chit for the morgue—and his leave.

“So overall, pretty helpful,” Jorik said to Adder several minutes later, cross-referencing the two pages of spots to check with a map of the city. He had to map the sewer disappearances by the cross-streets above them, which was a touch awkward, but those at least formed a small cluster—likely that was near the lair of whatever it was that was killing the workers. The nighttime killer’s victims and probable victims were far more spread out; none of the bodies were found near each other or near any of the bloodstains, and the spots were all over the city.

“First the bodies, then above ground, then below,” he said to Adder, and made for the morgue.

The coroner he spoke with was a little wary, but let him in when he showed her the chit the Captain had provided. The morgue was a good one, mostly below ground, with ample supplies of embalming fluid and salts. The scent of the preservatives almost completely overpowered the other smells one would expect from an industry that dealt with bodies, and Jorik couldn’t help wrinkling his nose a little. Witchers didn’t often deal with _preserved_ corpses, at least not on this scale.

“In here,” the woman said, and opened the door to a small room with four shredded bodies laid out on the slabs.

“Thank you,” Jorik said, and walked in. “I have a question, actually.”

The woman’s mouth flattened a touch, and she followed him. “What do you need?”

“Do the bodies show any signs of being partially eaten?” Jorik swept an eye over the nearest corpse, quietly mourning the necessary embalming that had wiped out any scents on the body. “I don’t see any teeth marks offhand, but were any organs or extremities missing, things like that?”

The coroner’s mouth softened a bit, and her eyebrows went up slightly. “No, I don’t believe there were any. I haven’t the time to go over all of them again, but we could examine one in depth, if you would like.”

Jorik ran his tongue over his teeth, thinking. “No, I thank you. None of the monsters who would be equally or more interested in eating them would have been so cautious that you wouldn't recall it from the initial autopsy."

"Hmm," the woman said, eyebrows truly raised now. "A touch alarming, but that makes sense."

“Exactly,” Jorik said. “Was there anything that seemed odd or unique about the victims?”

The coroner thought for a minute. “I recall we noted that the cuts were too ragged for a blade, which, after the second death, is what led Captain Aldis to put out the contract. Hmm. None of the victims have been particularly rich, but nor have they all been poor. This one,” she gestured to a man who’d had some very impressive muscles, “was walking home from work at the warehouses, or so his poor widow thinks, so they weren’t all out at the taverns either.”

Jorik nodded slowly. “And they were all walking alone,” he said.

“If they weren’t, none of their companions have come forward,” the coroner agreed.

“I think I have all I need for now,” Jorik said. “Thank you for your help.”

The coroner nodded and escorted him to the door.

“Vampire,” Jorik said quietly to Adder. “Almost certainly an ekimmara, at least for those poor corpses in there. Nothing else in a city would shred a person like that but not take a bite.”

He rubbed at his forehead. Of course, that also wasn’t the whole story—the other probable killings without bodies were a bit of a complication.

“Time to check out the places where they were found, then,” he said, and Adder snorted and shook her mane.

* * *

He was checking over the fourth site when it clicked.

“The _sewers_ ,” he said viciously, feeling like a fool. All of the sites so far had been near a sewer access tunnel. And he’d only checked two of the sites where a body had been found, but—

He checked the other corpse sites, and confirmed sewer access _and_ a tavern or brothel close by to each one—places where guards would patrol, anticipating trouble. In the interest of being thorough, he checked the other four bloodstain sites, but when he’d finished and retired to an inn for supper for himself and Adder, the most obvious commonality came back to sewer access.

 _And the corpses were found near places where a monster may have been interrupted,_ he thought, barely tasting the inn’s oxtail stew. _But an ekimmara dragging off bodies?_

He spent the rest of his supper entertaining and rejecting hypotheses, but the most likely situation that remained as he was scraping up the last bits on his plate was that the ekimmara had other vampire companions—ones it was probably in charge of, given the lack of partially eaten or truly torn-apart bodies. And it seemed additionally likely that the ekimmara’s probable companions were the source of the disappearances in the sewers.

 _ **Probably** no garkains,_ Jorik thought. Those tended to take charge in a group of lesser vampires, although he really shouldn’t discount them out of hand—he rather enjoyed living, and walking into a nest of vampires not prepared for the potential worst would be tantamount to suicide. Perhaps he could catch the ekimmara up above and only have to deal with its companions in the lair. _Let’s see… Black Blood, Cat, vampire oil, Swallow, maybe Blizzard—_

He wished he had a good metric for how many people each vampire subspecies would kill on average over a set period of time; he might be able to get a more solid idea of what he was up against if he did. Something to take notes on for later.

Taking a drink of his ale, he scribbled a couple rough calculations on the back of one of the sheets of paper Captain Aldis had given him.

 _Around five people per crew, three crews missing, five bodies and six probable murders, all on a roughly even spread over two months… Well. Even spread if you count the crews going missing as a bunched kill._ It made much, much more sense if you counted the sewer disappearances as part of the other killings—times where there weren’t any of the aboveground killings corresponded to when sewer workers went missing.

He made some _very_ rough estimates, based on the deaths. He hated being uncertain, but he wouldn’t bet on a group smaller than three or larger than five—and probably only one Ekimmara, given all of the aboveground kills were singular. Two ekimmara would have been more than enough to take out the three-man patrols of the guard, but the abandoned bodies and the taking of single victims suggested the aboveground hunter was wary of groups. The work crews, on the other hand, were probably attacked by more than one vampire, working in concert.

 _I need to get more information about that part of the sewers,_ he thought, looking at the rough radius on the map where he suspected the lair was. _Damn. Should have asked about who organizes the sewer crews when I was there the first time. Oh well._

A quick trip back to the guardhouse secured him the name and location of the sewer work supervisor and a place to keep Adder for the night. He took one of his waterskins and packed a wallet with the potions and blade oil he planned on using, considered for a moment, and then added two Moon Dust bombs and a vial of Petri’s Philter, just in case.

“I’ll be back,” he said, stroking Adder’s muzzle. “I promised the kid. Can’t let a couple of vampires get the better of me.”

 _If I’m unreasonably lucky, I’ll run across the ekimmara up here,_ he thought wryly as he jogged to the supervisor’s house. Hopefully the man was still awake.

He was, but he wasn’t particularly pleased about being disturbed outside of his working hours. Jorik didn’t feel overly sympathetic, given the man wasn’t overseeing much of anything _during_ work hours right now, but he kept his feelings to himself and asked about the section where the workers had gone missing.

“Well, I don’t have the maps _here_ ,” the man said, giving him an annoyed look. 

“Understandably,” Jorik said politely. They stared at each other for a moment before the man sighed.

”There were reports of some sort of blockage here,” the man said, tapping Jorik’s city map, right by the first crew’s disappearance. “We don’t know what it was, those sections are ancient and prone to clogs and collapses, but they cleared it before whatever-it-was got them—a second crew went down when we didn’t hear back from the first, they couldn’t find anything.”

“Hmm,” Jorik said. Now _that_ was very interesting information. “Were the other two that went missing responding to clogs as well?”

“No, those two groups were just doing routine checks. That everything?”

“Are there good maps of that section?” If there were, he could spend tonight looking for the ekimmara and tomorrow in the sewers.

“No. Been asking the Prince for years for the budget to get some, but since the crews know the area well enough he’s not wanted to spend the coin.”

 _Damn._

“Anyone I could speak with who knows that section?” Jorik tried.

“Not well,” the supervisor said with a grim twist. “All vanished.”

Jorik grimaced in sympathy. “Well, was worth a shot. Do you know where the street entrance to that section is?”

“You have to head down from here,” the man said, tapping a street several blocks away. “The direct passages were blocked up couple decades ago when the nobs started complaining about workers traipsing though their nice streets, and any time the subject of reopening them’s been raised since they throw fits.”

Jorik noted the street and rolled up the map. “Thank you for your help.”

The man grunted. “I’ll pray you don’t get killed down there. Much more of this and I’ll be out of a job.”

Jorik nodded and headed for the door. Once he was on the street, he checked to make certain of the direction and started heading for the sewer entrance.

_Now... for the hard part._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I'm writing fanfic, people can be as efficient and sensible as I want.
> 
> Also, I was incorrect; chapter 9 is also gonna be Jorik POV. I'm having WAY too much fun writing these investigations by the way.
> 
> (Edit: I probably should have put in a little more of the "not a werewolf" reasoning in text, whoops.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so in Witcher 3, vanilla Black Blood doesn't even last a quarter of an hour. I'm using the timing for the most improved version of the potion but not necessarily all the added effects, and I'm doing the same with Cat, too—Jorik's got 45 minutes until it wears off but it may not stop him from getting hypnotized if he runs into a fiend.
> 
> (A very confused fiend: *stuck in a sewer tunnel, making angry honking noises*  
> Jorik: that is one hell of a sewer clog)

The section of the sewers that Jorik descended into weren't all that different from the ones in Novigrad—spacious, uncomfortably rank, and with torch brackets at regular intervals. He could hear drowners hissing and rats squeaking from further in, too. It was dark, but not quite so dark that he needed a dose of Cat yet; with his pupils as dilated as they could get he could see quite well.

He ultimately needed to head east; he would walk south along the tunnel he was in until he found an offshoot into the older section. He debated lighting a couple of the torches that had been left behind in their brackets, but he ultimately decided it wouldn't be worth announcing his presence so blatantly.

The tunnel he was in was just starting to curve around towards the west, after a couple of minutes of walking, when he saw a dark spot in the eastern side of the tunnel—an entrance to the old section of the Ellander sewers.

 _Oh, wonderful,_ Jorik thought to himself. Not only was the tunnel so dark that he'd need to take Cat more or less immediately, but it was much, _much_ smaller than the more recent addition he was standing in. He would have to take care to make sure that his sword didn't get caught on walls as he was swinging it. In fact— Jorik drew his silver sword carefully and applied his vial of vampire oil with a bit of cloth. Better to be prepared and not have to worry about clearance while drawing.

Jorik crept up to the opening, listening as hard as he could and breathing deep. He couldn't sense anything that suggested a vampire close by; he should be safe enough going in. He reached into his wallet again and drew out a vial of Cat, uncorked and downed it one-handed, and slipped both vial and cork back into the leather pouch. He hovered over the Black Blood for a moment, while his face itched and his eyes burned as the Cat took effect, but he took his hand away. He couldn't risk it until he was much nearer the vampires—it didn’t last long enough to be used as a precaution. The eastern tunnel, interior now visible in muted grays, was set a little higher than where he was currently standing. Jorik shifted into a slightly lower stance and stepped up into it.

It had taken a lot of practice to develop a pace that allowed for thorough investigation while accounting for time constraints of potions, but it was damn invaluable. He didn’t _know_ where the ekimmara was, and that was one of the bigger possible nasty surprises of this hunt—it could potentially attack him at any time, and he would have to rely almost entirely on his hearing for warning. Water dripped from the ceiling and sloshed in the canal, and the smell of various human wastes was pervasive. No scent of rotting corpses yet—Jorik was reasonably certain that even if the other vampires were eating the majority of the bodies, they wouldn’t be scrubbing their lair clean. Decay would mean he was close.

Jorik worked his way further into the old sewers, meter by careful meter. There were less rats in this section, and no necrophages within hearing—basically a guarantee that something nasty was living here. He already knew that, but it wasn’t terrible to have confirmation.

Without a map of the sewers, he had to rely on his own memory to navigate towards his destination. The tunnels weren’t in a grid, either, which meant that Jorik sometimes had to backtrack from dead ends or tunnels that seemed to go the direction he wanted but then curved away. After what felt like far too long, he emerged from a side passage into a long, straight space that ran north and south.

 _Seems I’ve hit a main branch. This is at least as far east as the crews were, I can just look up and down this passage._ Jorik stepped into the tunnel and froze as he caught a faint whiff of rotting meat. _Aha._

The scent was only just barely detectable, but he thought it might be coming from the north. Traveling that direction for a minute confirmed it; the smell got stronger. Jorik slowed down his pace, listening as hard as he could and looking for anything out of place. The west wall was dotted with semi-regular openings into other tunnels, but there weren’t any on the east wall.

A minute in, he heard something. Focusing and tilting his head, he eventually identified it as a soft chittering like bats made. He crept forward, trying to pin down where the noises were coming from. The chittering was getting loud enough that he was feeling concerned when he noticed it—there was a hole in the east wall, with some scattered bricks from the tunnel wall on the ground near it. It was the only opening for at least ten meters in either direction, and a long breath confirmed that the strongest scent of decay was wafting from it. That was where the vampires were laired.

The sounds, too, were a little more identifiable from this distance—they sounded more like the mid-tone muttering of a fleder than the squeaking of a plumard or deep grumble of a garkain, and the near-constant sound of them told him there were definitely at least two of them. A single vampire might make noise to itself, but this was sustained, indicating a conversation of sorts.

 _Black Blood or Blizzard?_ Jorik considered. _Can’t take both, not if I want to be able to take Swallow if I need it. Though—it’s too tight to really maneuver in here. Better reaction time won’t matter if I get penned in. If the vampires back away, though—_ That decided it. Jorik uncorked the vial of viscous black fluid and downed it, shuddering a little as he felt his blood start to burn uncomfortably.

He checked to make sure all of his bombs and potions were easily accessible, then slid through the hole in the wall. He emerged into a stone room that didn’t look like part of the sewers at all, with three monsters grooming each other in the middle of the floor.

 _Yep, fleders,_ Jorik had time to think before they were on him. There was more room to maneuver in their little section of ruins, which worked both for and against him—they came at him from three directions at once, but when they broke the Quen he’d automatically cast and recoiled from the backlash, he was able to get in a long, vicious swipe that at least scored all three of them. He followed up with a heavy attack that knocked back the left-hand one and opened a bloody gash on its chest, then rolled forward out of range the furious swipes of the other two. The fleder he’d just injured screeched in anger and pain—possibly the other two had hit it by accident.

Jorik sprang to his feet and whipped around with another cut—as he’d expected to, he caught two of the vampires lunging at him with it. He had to almost throw himself to the side to escape the third, most injured one making its own attack, which sent it careening into the wall and left him off balance. One of the two who’d charged him first clawed at him, and he just barely got his sword up in time to keep it from impaling him. That, however, truly knocked him over, and the second one actually stomped on him as it tried to spring at where he had been, leaving his ribs screaming.

Jorik was not about to turn down that opportunity, ribs or no, and he left a deep, ugly gash in the fleder’s leg, fought clear of the mess, and recast Quen only to be knocked further backwards. The third heavily injured monster had recovered from its introduction to the wall. It broke the shield but didn’t manage to follow up; it was clearly weakening. He, however, was almost back at the hole he’d entered from now.

Jorik managed to drop the vampire with a slash through the neck and looked up to try and locate the other two. The leg-cut fleder tried a lunge at him, but he backed up a pace and took off the leg entirely, feeling something break in his ribs as he did.

“Fuck,” he muttered. A few more acrobatic stunts and he might end up puncturing a lung, which would probably get him killed.

The last fleder started for him the second he realized he’d been backed up into the tight quarters of the sewer.

He didn’t have _any_ space to swing, so he lunged instead like a noble with a rapier, and managed to spear the vampire through the chest as its claws tore right through his gambeson and a good bit of his flesh besides. Jorik let out a breath in a long, drawn-out hiss and hoped the Black Blood would hold the fleder at bay while he was busy disentangling them, but the vampire slumped instead.

 _Huh. Got it right through the spine,_ Jorik noted, looking up. _Fool’s luck, I suppose._

Jorik used his foot to push the fleder impaled on his sword off of it and wiped his forehead grimly. He could feel blood trickling down his side beyond the fire of the injuries—damn things had long arms, it had gotten him pretty good. He downed a Swallow and pushed past the body into the ruins. 

The other two fleders were crumpled there where they’d fallen. Jorik made certain they were dead and started examining the room, ignoring the itching sensation as the claw marks in his side healed over and his rib popped back into place. 

Apart from the large pile of fresh human bones in the corner, the space looked pretty grand—it was made of stone, carved with some care into elaborate whorls and wavy shapes. It didn’t look Elven, they usually carved representations of natural things, and Dwarven craft tended to more geometric knots and loops. Putting the question of the makers to the back of his mind for the moment, Jorik went over the room in detail, looking for other exits or cracks where there might be further monsters.

There were two sets of doors; one was filled with rubble from what was probably a collapsed hallway beyond. It looked solid, and the stones resisted a cautious and then an energetic attempt to shift them. The other doors were actually how Jorik had entered; there were signs that they had been bricked up, independently of the sewer wall, but a closer look showed fresh breaks and tool marks.

 _Probably the sewer workers noticed something when they were clearing the blockage,_ Jorik thought. The bricks that made up the sewer didn’t look like they’d been removed by the workers, and the ruin was just far enough away from where the first group had gone missing that the second probably hadn’t run across the new hole in the wall.

That mystery solved, Jorik examined the walls and the ceiling for any gaps or cracks wide enough for anything to get through. There weren’t _any_ —not even near the rubble-filled doors, which was extremely strange. Jorik brought a hand to his medallion, but it was still. If the work was still so solid after centuries… 

_That hallway was collapsed on purpose,_ he thought. This was not currently the time to ponder why, however, since it was still holding strong. He had an actual job to do.

Decapitating monsters was always a bloody mess, pun absolutely intended. Fleders didn’t have much worth harvesting on them, at least, so he didn’t have to debate between quality alchemical ingredients and expedience. The heads went into a game sack that Jorik attached to his belt with a knot he could easily slip free, and he piled the bodies in the corner of the room with the bones—after sorting through the pile for any jewelry or bits that might indicate identity—and set them burning with a concentrated blast of Igni. Those tasks completed, Jorik took another Cat and a long pull from his waterskin. This wasn’t over yet.

* * *

Jorik wasn’t sure who was more surprised when he hopped down into the newer sewer tunnels and came almost face-to-face with the ekimmara. It was only a couple of meters away, carrying a fresh corpse over its shoulder, and despite having a face like a bat crossed with a nightjar the shock on it was clear.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Jorik choked out while yanking the knot on the game bag free. He was going to die like an _idiot_ , the blood from the heads had kept him from smelling the human corpse and the ekimmara _carrying_ the body instead of dragging it had kept him from hearing the damn vampire over the ambient sounds of the sewer and his own burden.

The ekimmara shrieked in what was probably a similar sentiment and threw the body to the side before charging him. Jorik slid to the side, out of the way of the claws, and made a mental note to be amused at the vampire almost tripping over the game bag _later_. The bearded vampire went invisible as soon as it had its feet properly under it, and Jorik immediately grabbed and threw one of his Moon Dust bombs in response. The bomb exploded in a cloud of glittering shards, and the ekimmara was suddenly visibly again as the silver coated it and stuck in its beard and ruff.

It spun and tried to swing at him, and Jorik hopped backwards while casting Igni. Some of its hair caught, with an absolutely _awful_ smell, and it howled and beat at the flaming patches. Rather than spend the moment of reprieve trying to fumble out a potion vial, Jorik advanced and struck at the distracted vampire with his blade. He opened up two cuts on its arms and one on its stomach before it sprang for him, which he sidestepped, and followed up with a heavy stroke at the vampire’s back.

Of course, he promptly fucked up his next dodge—his foot landed on a slippery spot on the edge of the canal and he recovered only at the cost of the ekimmara gouging his hip. All ekimmaras’ claws were wickedly sharp and Jorik could feel blood starting to pour down his leg.

_Damn it, if I can’t finish this fast I’m just going to keep losing blood while it’s healing._

Instead of going on the defensive, he pressed in again, hammering the vampire with sword blows. He broke one of the monster’s arms with one, sliced off part of an ear with another, and on the return of that stroke brought the silver sword down into the ekimmara’s torso, edge biting deep into its flesh. Its scream of pain turned into a gurgling noise, and it tried to take off Jorik’s head with its usable arm.

Jorik had to yank on his sword to get it free—must have been caught on a rib—and the vampire caught his scalp with a claw in exchange. Jorik sent out another burst of Igni before any blood got in his eyes, and delivered one final blow while the vampire was reeling, managing to sink his sword into the ekimmara’s skull. It collapsed like a puppet with its strings all suddenly cut.

Jorik sighed in relief. Then he pulled his sword loose, and dug in his wallet for a second vial of Swallow, downing it and then putting pressure on his hip to slow the bleeding while the potion did its work. That sent shooting pains all across his hip bone and he gritted his teeth and tipped his head back to try and keep the blood from his scalp wound from getting into his eyes.

 _Damn, it might’ve chipped the bone,_ Jorik realized as his hip continued to throb agonizingly.

When the bleeding had slowed, he took his hand off and wiped the blood off of his forehead. He needed to wipe down his sword, collect the ekimmara’s head, and burn its body before any drowners showed up to see if there were any bits they could steal.

He was taking a moment to focus on the pain in his hip after getting through the ekimmara’s spine when he looked up again and really _registered_ the human corpse it had tossed aside. Shit. He should probably haul the poor man up to the guard or to the morgue instead of just burning him.

The second dose of Cat was starting to fade as he checked the ties on the game bag, hauled the human corpse over his shoulder, set the ekimmara’s remains alight, and headed for the exit, limping.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not even going to give an estimate of when this aside is going to be over, I will _clearly_ be incorrect, as I was the last three times. I just hope all of you are still enjoying this!
> 
> (that said, the fight is over; now it’s payment, supplies, and finding out what Lambert’s been up to while Jorik’s been running around in the sewers! Eventually Jorik will get back to Being A Dad)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I herd u liek Witchers bathing  
> (I finally have a developed mental image of what Jorik looks like, woo!)
> 
> Very slight potential gross-out warning for the scene where Jorik's showering; it semi-continually mentions him trying to get mostly-dried blood out of his hair, and a more serious warning for a very brief mention of corporal punishment (that was not carried out) in Nenneke's dialogue immediately after Jorik mentions Zdena.

In a stroke of luck, Jorik didn’t have any trouble avoiding late-night wanderers and guard patrols as he made his much-slowed way back to the guardhouse. He knew better than to trust any peacekeeping force to not attack first and only ask questions much, much later. And, admittedly, this time he _was_ hauling a human corpse around. He kept his hands away from his sword hilts as he walked into view of the guardhouse.

“Halt!” called one of the guards, raising a crossbow.

Jorik did so, but was ready to dump the body and throw himself to the side. "Captain Aldis hired me to investigate the recent deaths and disappearances," he called. "I just fulfilled my end of our contracts."

There was a bit of concerned muttering, but the crossbow was slowly lowered at the end of it. Jorik stayed where he was until the guards beckoned him over.

“Gods,” one of them said as he got close, disgust on his face. “Were ye in the sewers?”

Jorik raised an eyebrow. “That _is_ where fifteen people went missing, so yes.”

The guard shook his head. “You’ve a stronger stomach than I.”

Jorik hummed. “Where should I leave this poor man?” he asked, gesturing at the body he was carrying.

“There’s a shed on the south side here where we sometimes hold bodies, take him over there. I’ll let the captain know you’re back.”

Jorik nodded and headed towards the indicated shed, trying very hard not to limp. He’d just laid the body down on the bench when Captain Aldis entered the shed.

“I hope the blood’s not yours,” the man commented, only mildly alarmed.

“Most of it isn’t,” Jorik said with a slight grimace.

“I see. Well, in the interest of not frightening anyone, you have my permission to use the guardpost showers. They’re not perfect but better than tromping off to an inn like that.”

“Thank you,” Jorik said, a little surprised.

“So, the jobs are done?” the captain prompted.

Jorik rubbed at his forehead a bit. “Yes, I have the heads here,” he said, pulling the game bag loose. “All vampires. The street killer was an ekimmara—” he pulled the head out by the beard and laid it on the floor, “and the sewers was a group of three fleders.” He laid those out as well.

The captain whistled low. “Ugly buggers, those.”

Jorik shrugged. “Most monsters are. The fleders were in a room behind a collapsed wall in the old sewers—I think part of the sewer tunnel collapsed, and the workers noticed a bricked-up doorway behind it and got curious. The room was otherwise completely sealed, with a purposefully collapsed hallway blocking the only other door. I really wouldn’t recommend trying to excavate it, given,” he gestured at the heads.

Captain Aldis looked thoughtful, then spoke, very quietly. “Was the— ekimmara?— originally in that room as well?”

Jorik blinked. _Damn, he’s clever._

“I won’t mention it to the Prince or the guard commander if it was; regardless of where it came from it was still a _separate_ problem, but I prefer to know if I have to worry about _where_ it came from,” the captain said, still at a volume that would probably be inaudible to a human two meters away.

Jorik thought for a second, then nodded.

Captain Aldis nodded in return, then spoke up in a much more boisterous tone. “Well, I’m afraid we can’t get you your payment until tomorrow morning; have to run to the guard commander for confirmation to draw the money, and he’s usually at the palace, but you’re welcome to get cleaned up and have a kip in one of the beds here.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Jorik said, meaning it. “Can you point me to the showers?”

“Back of the main building,” the captain said. “Evening shift’s almost ended, but if anyone gives you trouble, you’ve my permission to lay them out if you must. I’ll tell Sergeant Eddin so as well.”

Jorik’s jaw dropped a little in shock, but he nodded. When the Captain gave him a nod in return and walked off, Jorik walked stiffly over to the stables where Adder was, to collect his bathing things and a change of clothes. Even with the captain’s assurance he’d prefer to be done before anyone else came in.

* * *

The showers were wonderful, despite not being too complex. Jorik suspected they were connected by pipes to a water tank on the roof of the guard house, and there was a mechanism that moved something blocking the flow when you pulled on a chain, to allow the water to flow out through a piece of metal with several holes punched through it. He had to stand, but he mitigated the pain in his hip by leaning on the opposite leg, so that was all right. He tried not to use too much of the water, but he couldn’t help turning his face up for a moment while he was rinsing and just enjoying it.

He was working on getting clotted blood out of his hair and beard with soap and his comb when he heard people approaching. Shit. Too late to avoid them now.

He kept working on his hair, both because it needed it and because it was very difficult to appear intimidating while fighting with snares in a mane as long as his. He noted the conversation occurring between the guards walking to the showers—complaining about what had dunked them in compost, from the sound and the smell.

“At least Kaya caught the filcher, I— oh!” one of the guards said. She’d opened the door and caught sight of him, and she was staring a little. 

Jorik nodded to her and said “Captain Aldis gave me leave to get cleaned up,” while he continued working on the biggest clot from where the Ekimmara had gotten him in the scalp.

"And you are…?" the other woman asked, staring at the right side of his head. Well, he couldn't blame her.

"Name's Jorik. I'm a Witcher, Guardswoman," he said politely.

He saw the understanding dawn, and they stopped staring quite so openly.

They were just starting the water on their own showerheads when the clot came loose. Jorik couldn’t help making a noise of satisfaction as he combed it free.

“Dare I ask?” the second guardswoman said, a little shocked, after she looked over.

“Just from a long scratch. Scalp wounds always bleed a lot,” Jorik said.

“What did the scratching?” the first guardswoman asked.

“The street killer,” Jorik said after a moment of debate. “It was a vampire, clawed at my head while I was trying to get my sword free of its ribs.”

“A vampire?”

“Some of them aren’t... intelligent like people are. They tend to just tear people apart to get at blood,” Jorik explained, going over everything with the comb again before pulling the chain to rinse the soap out.

“Gods,” the second guardswoman said.

Jorik just nodded and started wringing out his hair. Eventually he got it to just damp, whereupon he patted himself mostly dry with a piece of cloth hung on a rack in the shower room for just that purpose. He noticed the guardswomen were still stealing glances at him as he dug out his jar of rose hip salve and smoothed some of it into his more troublesome scars, leaving his hair flipped to the side so that it didn’t rub all the salve off of the burn scars. The second guardswoman’s glances were a little concerned and the first’s were seemingly appreciative. Bit of a shame he didn’t have the time; a longer glance on his end showed she wasn't a bad-looking woman—pale pink skin, with long dirty blonde hair that she’d had braided tight to her head, excellent muscles, and chilly light blue eyes. Ah well.

He’d cleaned off as much of his armor as he could, but the gambeson and his trousers were going to need stitching as well. He had a set of breeches and a shirt he could wear in the interim, though, and he pulled those on, making sure to tie the sleeves above his forearms, before heading back out to Adder to put his things away.

He spent some time after that re-cleaning, sharpening, and oiling his silver sword and repairing his armor. It took him a bit, but making sure everything was ready to go _before_ you needed it again was a deeply ingrained mindset, and it had saved his life more than once. He was still very glad when he could make his way into the guard house, sit down in a quiet corner, and slip into meditation.

* * *

He surfaced the next morning to a smallish brown-skinned brunette woman in probably her mid-thirties looking at him.

“Sweet Melitele, man, have you been sitting there all night? We do have beds,” she said, sounding a little annoyed.

Jorik rolled his shoulders and neck a bit before answering. “I was fine.”

The woman raised a scarred eyebrow at him. “I’m sure. I’m Sergeant Sala. Eddin filled me in. We should have your coin soon, Eddin sent a runner to the palace around seven.”

“Thank you,” Jorik said, and stood up. His hip was more or less fine now, which made the prospect of shopping a much less grim one. He flipped his hair back and pulled his sleeves down so that they covered the burn scars like usual, then pulled his hair into a loose queue near the end to keep it from flying around and getting in his face.

“Would you like some tea while you wait?” the sergeant asked. “I should have a pot ready in my office.”

“I would, thank you,” Jorik said, and followed her upstairs.

Jorik drank tea and made a mental list of things he needed to buy while the sergeant read reports, and around the time the pot emptied a younger man came into the room with a large purse stamped with the Ellander coat of arms. The sergeant had the man stay while Jorik counted the contents, and Jorik thanked her, asked her about the city markets, and took his leave when he’d made sure he had what was owed.

At the main market, Jorik purchased a small stack of turnovers from a baker and worked his way through them as he walked the market. The meat ones were pretty gristly but the cheese and onion were quite good.

He purchased half a bushel of dried peas for breakfast porridge, a full bushel of mixed grains to supplement Adder’s feed, and replenished his bag of dried food at one large stall, bought a block of salt about the size of both his fists from another, an extra waterskin from a third, and found a fourth from which he got an additional bedroll and good wool blanket. Those purchases took the entire rest of the morning and started to wear into the afternoon, since Jorik had to find merchants who would sell to him, and then haggle mightily to keep them from overcharging him by ridiculous amounts. There was a tailor and a cobbler near the market square too, in full shops and not stalls, but Jorik preferred to pay the Temple for some used clothes for Lambert; he didn't want to advertise that he was traveling with a child, even if that might change.

Longer term supplies taken care of, he also purchased some shorter term ones; a couple of loaves of traveler's bread and a few chunks of hard cheese. After several moments' thought, he bought a kettle and a block of tea, and added a crock of honey when he came across a merchant selling some that smelled wonderfully floral.

He wandered into the section of the market devoted to produce to get Adder a few treats and was immediately drawn by the nose to a stand that had strawberries and early plums and cherries. He dithered for a moment but bought a half-kilo of each.

 _And I can share them with the kid,_ he thought, which as far as excuses went wasn’t a bad one.

Adder got her treats as well, in the form of carrots and celery, which she happily devoured and then thanked him for by rubbing her head all over his shirt. He couldn’t help chuckling a little and stroking her. He was in fairly good spirits as he returned to the temple, which, in retrospect, meant he probably should have anticipated something going sideways.

* * *

Several of the Sisters doing tasks outside actually _glared_ at him when he returned, and he had to rack his memory for anything particularly offensive he could have done in the past few days. He noticed one hurrying off, probably to fetch someone, and in the interest of not making anyone more upset, he stood to the side and tried to not be obvious.

Nenneke came striding out to meet him a few minutes later—she had clearly been working in the gardens and hadn’t even halted to give her hands a proper wash.

“What _happened?_ ” he asked her, baffled.

“Lambert,” she said succinctly, and Jorik had to stop his mouth from popping open.

“What did he _do?_ ” Jorik asked. The kid had been perfectly nice and even went out of his way to be helpful, despite not trusting Jorik at all, so what the hell had he done to get half the Sisters so ticked off that they were glaring at _him?_

“So Sister Yltha, the theology teacher for the younger children, starts every lesson saying that there are no wrong questions.” Nenneke started, and Jorik groaned aloud, completely involuntarily, as he realized where this was going.

“Oh yes,” Nenneke said, grimly amused. “He asked some _very_ ‘impertinent’ questions about Melitele’s role as the protector of women and children and how it related to domestic abuse. Yltha was in a bit of a tizzy, afterwards, she’s one of the Sisters who actually wants to explain things to people and she was not prepared for a nine-year-old asking those sorts of questions.”

“Of course not,” Jorik muttered.

“So that had people quite uncomfortable. Then—”

“ _Then?_ ” Jorik couldn’t help saying.

“That was the first class of the day,” Nenneke said. “He had plenty more time. In any case, Jakob, who’s in charge of chores, had some things to say about how the lad was asking questions about the collective bargaining power of servants. Apparently he was rather annoyed when he found out that any servant or group of servants who refused to work, even for a reasonable excuse, could potentially be summarily dismissed and even blacklisted by their master, and had no particular recourse against it.”

Jorik let his head sink into his hands. “I told him about Aedirn,” he admitted in a mumble, past the barrier of his fingers.

" _That_ makes a certain amount of sense, then. He also beat up one of the older boys," Nenneke said, but before Jorik could react, she held up a hand. "Not that he didn't richly deserve it— one of the novices who saw the fight said that the boy was trying to steal something of Lambert's, though she couldn't tell what."

"Ah," Jorik said. "Yes, I think I know. I don't know what it _is_ , exactly, but— it's a toy of some kind, he talks to it and doesn't want anyone to see it."

Nenneke nodded. “The novice and I managed to talk Sister Heleny out of corporal punishment—Melitele be praised, I can’t imagine what he would have had to say about being physically injured as an attempt to enforce the prohibition of physically injuring another student—but Heleny spent a good half-mark talking about the ‘insolent face’ he had while she was lecturing him for resorting to his fists.”

“Gods,” Jorik said with a wince.

“Oh yes,” Nenneke said. “That was yesterday evening, and I decided it would be better for everyone if he wasn’t in contact with the other students or Sister Heleny, so I brought him to my cell afterwards and he was helping me in the gardens today. Sister Merrin was a little skeptical, but it turns out he’s very good with plants. I sent him back to my cell to have supper a little while ago.”

“He did mention he was good with plants,” Jorik said. “Listen, Nenneke—”

“If you’re about to apologize I will smack you,” Nenneke said, faux-stern. “He deserved the chance, and he _deserves_ adults who will speak up for him. I would love to keep him as an assistant, even, but...” she gestured a little, managing to encompass Lambert’s irreverence, antagonism, and gender in one hand movement.

“More’s the pity,” Jorik said, only partially joking.

“It is,” Nenneke said. “I wish I had more women with Sister Addana’s expertise.”

Jorik nodded. “He’s in your cell, then?”

“He should be. I need to get back to the gardens, but you’re welcome to go see him. I can probably arrange for another supper and a bath for you, too.”

“This your way of telling me I still smell like the sewers?” Jorik said with a smile. He did, a bit, but he was used to ignoring things like that.

Nenneke laughed a little. “It might be.”

He smiled again and led Adder to the stables as she headed off. He took his saddlebags with him this time, along with the fruit he’d bought, and went to Nenneke’s cell. He knocked and waited until Lambert opened the door, registering the shock as the kid saw him and immediately looked down. 

“Hey,” Jorik said. Lambert was glaring fiercely at the ground, almost certainly expecting to be punished in some way. “Did you have a good time working with Nenneke today?” he asked instead.

That brought the kid’s head shooting up, his eyes wide. He nodded, very slowly.

“Good. I’m glad you at least didn’t have a completely miserable time,” Jorik said.

Lambert clearly wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so Jorik continued.

“I bought some fruit at the market today to share. Want some? I’ve got strawberries, cherries, and plums.” Jorik gently hefted the basket the merchant had packed them in.

The kid’s head twitched forward in what was probably an involuntary nod.

“C’mere, we can sit down and eat them, they’re probably going to be overripe by tomorrow anyway,” Jorik said, moving a little further into the room and sliding his other burdens off to rest at the side of the door. He didn’t want to accidentally get juice on Nenneke’s bed, but the chairs wouldn’t really work either. He settled for the floor, and patted the spot next to him. Lambert sat, looking torn between fleeing or leaning into him.

Jorik, having realized Lambert was reluctant to take food unless it was specifically allocated for him after the trout, handed him a strawberry and took one for himself. They sat and enjoyed the fruit quietly, collecting the stones from the cherries and plums in a scrap of spare cloth Jorik pulled out, and about halfway through the basket Lambert very, _very_ cautiously tipped towards Jorik until he was brushing against Jorik’s side.

By the time the basket was almost empty he was actually leaning against him, and Jorik, pressing his luck, gently reached out and rested his hand lightly on Lambert’s far shoulder. The kid twitched, but he didn’t pull away, which was probably the best outcome.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Jorik said softly, keeping his arm light around Lambert’s shoulders. It wasn’t at all adequate to explain what exactly he was sorry _about_ , but— “I’m so, so sorry you have to deal with this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh look the hurt is back.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so the Ismena river isn’t quite where it’s supposed to be, at least according to one of the maps available, but shhh.

Lambert had absolutely no idea what was going on, which had unfortunately become something of a trend. He hadn’t—well, no, he’d _meant_ to get some answers out of the priestess talking about how _wonderful_ and _loving_ and _protective_ Melitele was, and he’d _meant_ to point out how stupid it was that servants for rich people had to rely on the rich people not being completely terrible, and he’d _absolutely_ meant to pound the stuffing out of the other boy, who thought that being only a little bigger and a little older than Lambert would keep him from doing anything about trying to steal Zdena, but he maybe hadn’t meant to cause quite as much trouble as it seemed he had.

But instead of getting a thrashing from the priestesses, the Witcher’s friend Nenneke had apparently forbidden the Sister in charge of the kids from hitting him, and all that had happened was he’d had to listen to a stupid lecture about not solving problems by hitting people. It was even more stupid because the Sister had admitted outright she’d wanted to solve the problem of him hitting another boy by hitting _him_ , but he’d managed, just barely, to keep from pointing that out. Adults didn’t like it when you pointed stuff like that out, as he'd proven, and he already knew how the Sister would react. Besides, nobody had hit him for five days now—minus the nekker and a few glancing blows from the other boy—and he hadn’t wanted to break that streak yesterday.

Of course, then the Witcher had come back, and Lambert had felt his stomach drop. He’d thought he might have one more day before he had to worry about the Witcher’s reaction. He wasn’t _sorry_ , but he didn’t want the Witcher angry with him. And then, much like with the runaway attempt, the Witcher hadn’t reacted how he’d expected _at all_. He hadn’t even brought it up, except for the question about helping in the gardens.

After the Witcher had… held him, a little, a novice had showed up to Nenneke’s room with food, which the Witcher had thanked her for and then eaten. Once he'd finished, he'd sat down in the corner with his saddlebags. He’d set up what looked like a tiny still, and pulled several little bottles and bits of herbs and a few other odd substances out of his bags, and started mixing things. Lambert had crept over to watch, and the Witcher’s lips had twitched and he’d started explaining what he was doing.

“...But you can’t get these completely right unless you have at least a little magic of your own,” the Witcher said, capping a last vial and starting to clean up.

Lambert nodded. That certainly made more sense than the combinations of ingredients on their own.

“You best not have gotten Drowner brains on my floor,” Nenneke said, walking in. Lambert’s head snapped up. He hadn’t heard her coming.

“I wouldn’t waste useful ingredients just to annoy you, Nenneke,” the Witcher said. 

Nenneke smiled wryly. “Good. Now go have that bath.”

“Yes ma’am,” the Witcher said, putting the last of his things into his bags. “Ah; I forgot to say earlier, I wanted to pay for some extra clothes for Lambert.”

“I thought you probably would,” Nenneke said. “You found some already, didn’t you Lambert?”

He _had_ been made to put on and then take off several different sets of clothes and shoes, but he hadn’t seen them anywhere since. 

“I didn’t see them after they had me try them on,” Lambert said, a little defensively.

“They’re holding onto them until they get paid for them,” Nenneke said.

“I’ll collect them after I bathe,” the Witcher said. He looked at Lambert. “We’re going to head out fairly early tomorrow, okay?”

It seemed kind of pointless to nod, but the Witcher was clearly looking for some kind of confirmation, so Lambert did.

“Is your leg doing all right?” the Witcher asked.

“I rebandaged it this morning,” Nenneke said. “It shouldn’t need anything until tomorrow evening.”

“Then I’ll see you in the morning, kid. I’m going to go soak for a while,” he said, and walked away.

Lambert made a face. He _really_ hadn’t been sure about the hot bath he'd had. Warm water was basically okay, but really hot water was— how could you be sure it wasn’t _too_ hot? 

“Not a fan?” Nenneke asked. Lambert shrugged, a little uncomfortably.

“You know, I haven’t met a single Witcher that won’t happily take a hot bath if offered,” Nenneke said. “I wonder if they're all like that from the start or if it’s learned.”

 _If Witchers are like that from the start then why am I here?_ Lambert thought, a little bitterly.

It was quiet for a little while, and Lambert looked at Nenneke. He couldn’t read her expression, exactly, but it was soft.

“It’s probably a good time to get to sleep,” she said.

She wasn’t exactly wrong. It was starting to get late.

Lambert pulled the pallet Nenneke had had brought in out from under the bed and tried to get comfortable.

* * *

It felt like no time at all before he woke to a hand on his shoulder. He shot upright, but realized that it wasn’t his dad; it was the Witcher.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” Lambert grumbled. He should have woken up when Nenneke had left for predawn services, but her empty bed told him she’d slipped out without him noticing.

“We should have time for breakfast,” the Witcher said.

Lambert thought for a minute about eating in the large hall with the pilgrims and students and probably the Sister and twitched.

“‘M not hungry,” he said.

The Witcher looked at him for a long moment but nodded, and then held out a small stack of clothes, with some boots on top. “Will you get changed and meet me at the stables?”

“Okay,” Lambert said, and took the clothes. He closed the door behind the Witcher as he left and leaned against it as he got changed into the new clothes. They were… strange, really. They were a lot thicker than his usual outfits, and the bottoms of the boots were so thick that he couldn’t feel the ground through them. He tucked Zdena back into his shirt and folded his other clothes, then trotted out to the stables.

The Witcher was there, still in the clothes he’d been wearing last evening and without his swords strapped on, and he was holding a bowl of porridge and a horn spoon that looked like they belonged to the Temple.

“I know you said you weren’t hungry, but you should have some food if you can,” he said, gesturing slightly with the bowl. “I’ll trade you for your clothes so I can put them away.”

Lambert was a little stunned, but traded his things for the bowl. There was fruit and honey and milk in the porridge, which was more than Lambert had dared to add yesterday. He glanced at the Witcher, who looked completely absorbed in putting things away and shifting things on the horse, and then back to the bowl.

The porridge tasted _amazing_. He tried to eat it quickly but kept having to slow down to taste it again. When he’d finally scraped the last bits out of the bottom of the bowl, the Witcher adjusted one more strap, gave the horse a few pats, and turned to him.

“Ready to go?”

Lambert nodded and put the bowl and spoon down on a sill, and let the Witcher help him into the saddle. At least he wasn’t starting out sore this time.

“Oh, almost forgot,” the Witcher said, and handed Lambert a wide-brimmed hat. “Less woods around here, that’ll help with the sun.”

Lambert accepted it and put it on, and they started off.

* * *

Right when the sun was starting to climb the edge of the sky, they passed by what must be the city of Ellander. Lambert couldn’t help staring. It was _huge_ , with a wall around it even bigger than the Temple of Melitele’s, and even early in the morning there were people and carts streaming in and out of the huge gates that dotted the wall.

“It’s pretty impressive, huh?” the Witcher said.

Lambert looked at him out of the corner of his eye and nodded.

They came to a large bridge across a small river just past the city. The Witcher ducked his head a little as they made for it, and Lambert watched him out of the corner of his eye. 

_He doesn’t want people to know he’s a Witcher right now_ , Lambert realized. _That’s why he doesn’t have his swords or armor on._

There were people here; Lambert could make a scene, maybe. Yell that the Witcher had taken him from his mom. But— the Temple of Melitele was right there. That was where they would take him if they took him away from the Witcher. And the Temple had the stupid adults, and it had Nenneke, who was a friend of the Witcher, and last night—

Lambert kept his head down too as they crossed the bridge.

They traveled in silence along quiet back roads until midday, when the Witcher pulled out some bread and cheese. 

“Lunch?” he asked, offering it to Lambert. As he turned, Lambert saw something glittering in the Witcher’s hair. It was silvery and he couldn’t quite figure out what it was, even squinting.

“Something wrong?” the Witcher asked.

Lambert felt his face heat up a little at being caught staring. “You have— there’s something shiny in your hair.”

The Witcher blinked, looking a little confused, but then his face cleared. “Ah, yeah. It’s probably a silver shaving.”

Now Lambert was feeling confused.

“I had to use a bomb that spreads silver shavings everywhere on one of the jobs I took,” the Witcher said. “I always end up finding some in my hair or beard days later.”

“A _bomb?_ ” Lambert asked, worried and intrigued.

“They’re mostly only dangerous if you light the fuse,” the Witcher said. “And I keep them pretty well-hidden. If anyone tries to burn all my things they’re in for a spectacularly nasty surprise, though.”

Lambert was momentarily awestruck by the mental image, but something niggled at him.

“It just spreads shavings?” he asked.

“Yeah, there are a couple of types I make that don’t do damage. Moon Dust—the one I used—keeps monsters from transforming or going invisible.”

“Monsters can turn invisible?” Lambert asked. He’d heard of werewolves before, but never anything that could disappear.

“Some of them can, mostly vampires,” the Witcher said.

“You were fighting a _vampire?_ ” Lambert asked.

“Probably not one like you’re thinking,” the WItcher said. “There are a lot of different kinds of vampires. These ones weren’t sapient— uh, that’s the word for—”

“Monsters that can think like people,” Lambert said, a little put out that the Witcher thought he had to repeat himself.

“Exactly!” the Witcher said, and smiled a little, which threw Lambert off. Usually it was just his mom who was happy when he remembered things he’d been told.

“They weren’t sapient,” the Witcher continued, “so it wasn’t as difficult as it could have been. Actually— the last one and I almost walked right into each other without noticing, it was probably pretty funny how surprised we both were.”

“You didn’t notice?” Lambert asked.

The Witcher grimaced slightly. “I was carrying something that kept shifting around, I didn’t hear the vampire over it. And it’s hard to smell stuff when you’re in the sewers.”

“Sewers?”

“Yeah, Ellander has an underground sewer system. They’re relatively common in big cities like that; they’re made so there’s less waste in the streets.”

Lambert had to think about that for a minute, but it kind of made sense.

“Actually, the other three vampires were in a really interesting ruin just off the sewers; it might have been gnomish, but I’m just guessing based on what I knew it wasn’t— I haven’t seen much gnomish work.”

Lambert had heard that the elves had built palaces and huge underground burial spaces, and there were maybe the remains of dwarven kingdoms in the mountains, but he’d never heard of the gnomes building like that.

“Wouldn’t it have been really small if it was?” he asked.

The Witcher looked amused. “In really important spaces, everyone builds much bigger than they actually are. It’s a way to show off.”

Lambert frowned. Wasting space just to show you could seemed kinda dumb.

“In any case, that’s down there. I hope they don’t try to excavate it, though. I can’t see the Prince of Ellander spending enough money on protection for the diggers.”

“Do you think there are more vampires?” Lambert asked.

“I implied there might be, but the chamber they were in had both entrances sealed. I think they were probably trapped there on purpose—though they may have been sheltering in a room that was already sealed off from the surface and the occupants collapsed the hallway leading deeper to keep them from hunting, I’m not sure.” the Witcher shook his head. “There _are_ probably wraiths down there, though, and somehow there always seems to be one more nasty surprise when you don’t expect it.”

Lambert didn’t have any particular experience with ancient ruins, but the idea of nasty surprises wasn’t a new one. He nodded. Actually—

“Have you ever been in one before?” he asked.

The Witcher waggled his hand a bit. “Not particularly deep in one,” he said. “It was still bad enough, though. About half of the expedition I was supposed to be looking after was fairly sensible, if not particularly familiar with self defense, but there was one scholar and his favorite students who were just— idiots. Refused to listen to me when I told them not to do things, then blamed me for the outcomes. I admit I was fantasizing about somehow not noticing when they next pissed off a wraith by the end of it, but the sensible professor discovering the main burial chamber and refusing to credit the idiot was revenge enough.”

Lambert tilted his head a little.

“It’s sort of the same, showing off. Although in academia who gets credit for discoveries is also a factor in getting money to do more things.”

“It sounds complicated,” Lambert said.

“It is, and I’m glad there’s a lot less of it among Witchers,” the Witcher said.

That reminded Lambert of his situation, and he went quiet. He did take the bread and cheese when the Witcher offered it again, and tried not to look at the man again for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go play some Skyrim for a little while.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi Redania!
> 
> Content warning: mention of corporal punishment enacted on a amab kid for wearing clothes belonging to their sister. Only a mention, and the amab kid is not Lambert. Starts at "The possible double-meaning of that last bit only occurred to Lambert right as he was about to fall asleep," and stops after the end of that paragraph.

They were within sight of _another_ huge city when the Witcher found a place for them to camp for the night. How the Witcher had found a spot where they couldn’t see any of the roads leading to the city Lambert didn’t know, but he had. He also hadn’t gone hunting or started a fire, instead pulling out more bread and cheese.

“Too many people, not enough game,” he said a little apologetically, but since he had pulled out a crock of honey to put on the bread, Lambert didn’t mind _at all_.

When the Witcher stopped handing him food, he stretched out on the bedroll. It was a little chillier without a fire, but Lambert’s new clothes were warmer, too, and he fell asleep quickly.

In the morning they had more bread and honey before starting off towards the new city. The Witcher still hadn’t put his swords or armor back on, and as he started leading the horse towards the road, he turned to Lambert.

“The city up ahead is White Bridge,” he said. He had a tiny crease in his brow, and Lambert thought maybe he was worried. “It spans the Pontar, and has inhabitants on both the Temerian and Redanian banks. There shouldn’t be any trouble—Vizimir and Goidemar are getting on well enough, and their countries are at peace—but if there is, let me handle it.”

Lambert stared, a little shocked. They were going into _Redania_? He’d never been further from his home than the near village, but _now_ he was going into a completely different country—it didn’t seem real. Nor did the city, now that they were close—the name was literal; a large portion of the city was a _massive_ light-colored stone bridge over the river. It was so big that it actually had _buildings_ on it.

“It used to be timber, but Falka had that bridge destroyed when she began losing the ground she had gained in Redania, to try and prevent Vizimir and Goidemar from crushing her army between them. It didn’t save her in the end, though. They only recently finished rebuilding,” the Witcher said.

Lambert had heard of Falka, the madwoman who had led a bloody rebellion in Redania and Temeria. The village burned her in effigy during the yearly Saovine feast, which Lambert had gotten to go to once or twice. He hadn’t realized she’d been so _close_.

They passed into the city in silence, Lambert peering round as much as he dared and the Witcher with his face turned down. There were _so many people_ , with such a huge variety of looks and clothes, and the buildings were covered in paints brighter than any at the village back home. A woman who looked like his mom walked by with a skirt and blouse that were as decorated as Zdena’s. Lambert’s mouth opened a little in shock. She was even wearing _jewelry_ , a necklace with a beautiful amber pendant. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye until they passed her, and then he saw a white woman with colors painted onto her face, and then a dark-skinned man with a heavily-embroidered jacket of some bright blue fabric, and more and more people as they went further into the city.

When they reached the bridge, it wasn’t just people that Lambert had to look at; there were merchants selling things he had never even imagined; rolls of cloth, herbs and spices he’d never seen, more jewelry—and then, as they passed some line, food of all kinds, cooked and uncooked. The smell was so good that his stomach growled, despite breakfast only having been a couple of hours ago. He glared down at it. He was already getting more to eat at meals than he could ever remember having, it shouldn’t be complaining.

They were nearly across the bridge when a white man in a red quilted jacket called out to them.

“Hold there!”

The Witcher stopped and turned his head towards the man, who beckoned. 

“A boy on a laden horse looking like he’s never seen anything the like of our city before, and a man leading the horse who looks as though he’s seen us a hundred times,” the guard said as they approached, tapping at his belt with his hand. “Surely you can see why that might raise some suspicions.”

“You've a sharp eye, sir,” the Witcher said. “Surely no criminal gets by you. But there's reason for what you've seen. The boy’s my sister’s get—she married a Temerian farmer, and moved to his village with him. I like to visit when I can, and this year she supposed that they’d enough help and her boy was old enough to visit me and his aunt in Murviel, ‘till summersend.”

The guard's eyebrows went up in what might have been mock surprise. "Is that right? Only I would swear I've never seen you before."

"Ah, but surely your eye is turned for miscreants," the Witcher said, with an enthusiasm that almost startled Lambert. “You can judge at a glance who’s up to no good, and let travelers pass by without needing to second-guess.”

“Well then,” the guard said, a little nastily, “Why _did_ you catch my eye this time?”

The Witcher spluttered a little.

 _That **has** to be faked,_ Lambert thought, looking between the Witcher and the guard with some trepidation. _He **can’t** have done that on accident._

“Perhaps a token of my good faith—?” the Witcher said to the guard, who raised a hand.

“Boy,” he said, looking at Lambert. “Why don’t you tell me a little about your uncle, here?”

Lambert knew a trap when he heard one. The guard _wanted_ to find something wrong, but it couldn’t be so big that they got into serious trouble. Something that could be solved without a big fuss— 

“It’s as he says, sir,” he said. “He visits us often, ‘n pays Mom for some vegetables ‘n grain, most times. Says he and Auntie Rina like the taste better. This year Henrick, my cousin, just turned nine, so Mom said he could help out and I could go with Uncle Jerry. There’s so many people here, sir, and they’re all wearing such colorful clothes—I didn’t mean to stare so much, sir.”

The guard’s eyes narrowed and Lambert tried not to look too nervous.

“And he just comes on his horse, here, for the vegetables?” the guard asked.

“Uh-huh,” Lambert nodded. “Sometimes he takes a whole bushel each, but that’s usually when he can’t be back over the winter.”

The guard’s face relaxed a little and he turned back to the Witcher. Lambert bit his tongue so he wouldn’t sigh in relief—it looked like he’d gotten just the right amount of trouble.

“Well then, it seems perhaps I was overcautious,” the guard said. “Perhaps I’ll keep an eye for you in the future, if you’re by so often— we could be friendly, like.”

“Of course,” the Witcher said, a little tightly. “And some thanks for all the hard work you do.”

The guard laughed. “It is that! Let’s shake hands and be about our business.”

The Witcher’s smile remained a little fixed, but he shook hands with the guard and Lambert caught the glint of coin as it changed hands. The guard glanced down and smiled, slightly, then waved them on.

The Witcher led them away, and they rejoined the stream of people passing through the city.

When they were all the way through and out of the small maze of buildings, the Witcher turned to the east and led them along small tracks through a number of fields. When there were no more guards anywhere in sight, the Witcher turned to him. 

“That was inspired, kid.”

Lambert let his shoulders drop a little. “Sorry I couldn’t keep quiet.”

“It’s okay,” the Witcher said. “Should have guessed he would ask you. But you did a great job.”

Lambert felt his mouth curve up a little at the praise.

“Heading into Kaedwen shouldn’t be nearly as much trouble,” the Witcher said, and Lambert’s smile faded.

He was an _idiot_ , he really was. But he hadn’t trusted the guard to help him, any more than he did any of the travelers in White Bridge or at the other crossing, or even most of the Sisters at the Temple of Melitele. The Witcher— he was the only one Lambert had seen act _differently_ , and in ways that didn’t end with Lambert being hurt. Him and Nenneke, who was the friend of the Witcher.

That wanted more thought.

* * *

By evening, they’d started to head uphill a little. It wasn’t as dramatic as the mountains that the Temple had backed up to, but they were definitely going _up_. They also were mostly on a road, and the Witcher still hadn’t put his armor or swords back on. The farmland had shrunk to basically nothing a while ago, too.

“People come this way?” Lambert couldn’t help asking as they walked back and forth across a road that zigzagged its way up.

“It’s a little too dangerous for the Redanians to bother to have a good road on this bank of the river,” the Witcher said. “Too prone to rockslides.”

"Only the Redanians?" Lambert asked.

"All of the main four fight over a town on the south banks. Changes hands every few decades; I think Aedirn has it now. Redania’s managed to keep a treaty with Kaedwen for quite some time, though, so they haven’t really bothered for a while. What goods they desire can just sail past and make land outside of White Bridge or any of the other Redanian cities along the Pontar, and they can pole up the Pontar and into Kaedwen to sell.”

That was a lot more politics than Lambert was expecting. “Doesn’t Redania want things from Aedirn sometimes?”

“Of course, but not enough to pick a fight right now. So they make do, and trade with Temeria and Kaedwen, and pay a premium on goods from Aedirn,” the Witcher said.

It all seemed unnecessarily complicated to him, but presumably the people in charge thought differently.

They—or, well, mostly the Witcher—made camp as night began to truly fall. He didn’t venture far; he only had a single rabbit when he returned.

“Human trails,” he said, with a shrug of a shoulder, and he put the bones into his chavunok, along with what turned out to be dried peas from one of the new bits of baggage, water, and a bit of salt before covering and burying the whole of it in coals. “That should do us for breakfast, anyway.”

He had Lambert help groom the horse—Adder, Lambert recalled her name was—and check over her hooves for stones she might have picked up during the day, and then he put a bag over her nose with some grains in it, which she happily started eating.

“She seems like a lot of work,” Lambert commented when they were done, and startled the Witcher into a laugh.

“She can carry most of what I can, but without tiring me,” he said when he had stopped. “And she’s good company. You’re right, though. Taking care of any other living being is work. I wouldn’t give it up, though.”

The possible double-meaning of that last bit only occurred to Lambert right as he was about to fall asleep, and he was awake much longer than he meant to be thinking about it. He wanted the chance to talk to Zdena, but he didn’t dare do it when the Witcher was nearby. Even people who had been mostly okay often had problems with a boy who had an interest in skirts or a doll; it hadn’t been Aunt Irina’s husband, but his cousin—he had thrashed his son for dressing up in his sister’s clothes.

The next morning, he woke late and grumpy. The porridge was delicious, though, and hot, which warmed him in the chilly morning air. He tried to smile at the Witcher—Jorik—in thanks. The man smiled back, close-mouthed but wide, and finished everything but the bones in the pot after Lambert said he was full; and Lambert was pretty sure he would have eaten those if he could.

The Witcher stretched, and turned to Lambert.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

Lambert wondered what would happen if he said no. He wasn’t going to test it now, though, so he just nodded and let the Witcher help him into the saddle.

It was past midday when they came up to a little outpost, with a log palisade around the outside. There were a bunch of men in gray and white striped jackets around, too, although they looked more bored than anything.

The Witcher walked over to them, seeming more relaxed than he had yesterday.

“Hallo there, travelers,” one of the men said, raising a hand in greeting. “Going far?”

“Up past Ard Carraigh,” the Witcher said, and dug into a belt pouch. “Would you be willing to change some orens for ducats? Haven’t been able to stop at a bank or moneylender.”

“Ahh, why not,” the man said. “It’s not as if there’s much chance to spend coin here, orens’ll do as well as ducats for dicing.”

He called over another two men when he saw the contents of the Witcher’s purse, but they traded coins without any trouble.

“Thanks,” the Witcher said, and they went back out and kept moving east.

Lambert kept quiet for a while, but— "Did he even notice you're a Witcher?"

"Probably not," he said. "If I keep my pupils dilated and don't stare at someone, I'm usually fine for a little while. Pity it doesn't tend to work while buying things."

"Dilated?" Lambert asked. He hadn't heard that word before.

"Ah, here, look at my eyes," the Witcher said, turning his head towards Lambert. They were slitted, like usual, but as Lambert watched they went huge and round, until he couldn’t even see the gold, and then back to normal.

“People generally can’t do that on command; your pupils getting bigger means they let in more light, which helps you see better, in the dark or if there’s something you’re interested in. There are some drugs that will cause that too,” he said. “But Witchers can do it on purpose if they want."

Lambert blinked. “Why doesn’t it usually work when you’re buying things?”

“If someone’s looking long enough they can tell it’s not just really dark eyes, and then they tend to think I’ve taken some of those drugs, and that just spirals off into other problems, mostly,” the Witcher said. “It’s also kind of uncomfortable, everything gets painfully bright.”

Lambert thought about that for a minute. He’d had that happen before, going from the inside of h— of his family’s house to the outside when the shutters were closed on a bright afternoon. It almost hurt. And that, but not getting better? Ouch.

“So I don’t do it too often,” the Witcher finished.

Lambert nodded, a little distracted. He was still thinking about home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bye Redania!
> 
> Also, laurelnose drew me Jorik's face! (burn scar not showing, because ahaha way too much to ask for in a sketch) https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/622137331619643392/akilah12902-replied-to-your-post-i-love


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, things should start escalating in the next couple of chapters! We’re approaching the climax! (and yet more hurt)

“How would you feel about learning a little more about riding?” the Witcher asked. The road had stopped switching back on itself a little ways back, and although they were higher up than they’d been before, everything was mostly on one level.

Lambert shrugged. He didn’t really care either way, but he was clearly going to spend a lot of time on the horse—Adder—so it might be useful to learn, at least.

“Well, first things— heels down, keep the ball of your foot on the stirrups, hold on with your thighs, I think I mentioned all of those?”

Lambert nodded.

“Also, best to sit up straight,” the Witcher said, and Lambert straightened, a little guiltily.

“Now, Adder’s actually a fairly fancy horse,” the Witcher said. “She’s gaited, and I had her since she was a filly, so I was able to train her to act how I’d like. Part of that is that she’ll readily take direction from her rider shifting their weight or nudging her with their legs, but only when I’m not leading her. That kind of direction’s a little advanced, though, so right now I’m going to show you how to use the reins and how to get her moving.”

“Gaited?” Lambert had to ask.

“She can keep up a smooth pace in-between a walk and a run, essentially,” the Witcher said. “But let’s stick to a walk for now.”

“Okay,” Lambert said, nervous.

The Witcher stopped the horse and flipped the reins so that they were lying back across her neck. She pricked her ears a bit, one pointing back towards him.

“You need to pick up the reins. Keep them mostly slack for now.”

Lambert did so, and the Witcher showed him how to adjust his hold.

“The most important thing about using the reins is to keep things gentle. A mouth’s a soft place, and if you yank at the reins you can hurt a horse. Now, to get Adder moving, you’re going to tap her in the sides with your feet.”

“Um,” Lambert said, a little uncomfortable with the idea of even sort-of kicking an animal as big as Adder.

“Not too hard, but it’s how you tell her you want her to go,” the Witcher said. “And then you can guide with the reins. Pull straight back to tell her to stop, and for turns pull with the hand on the side you want to turn to.”

Lambert felt like this was all moving perhaps a bit too fast, but he could only look at Jorik pleadingly.

“It’s all right, kid. I’m right here, and unless you actually kick her and startle her into a gallop I’ll be able to keep up,” he said. “Now, give her a tap.”

Lambert took a deep breath, made sure he had a firm grip on the reins, and nudged Adder with his heels. She flicked an ear and gave him a _look_ , but started moving forward, at the same pace they’d been going before.

“There you go,” the Witcher said. “Not too bad, right?”

It was about the same as when Lambert _hadn’t_ been the one supposedly controlling the horse, but it was a lot more nerve-wracking because of that last fact.

“Try steering her left,” the Witcher said, and Lambert nervously pulled his left hand back. 

Adder responded, heading towards the side of the road. Lambert pulled a little on the right rein when it looked like she was getting too close to the drainage ditch, and she obligingly moved back.

The Witcher then had Lambert make Adder stop, and start again, and then he started telling Lambert to adjust his posture or keep his heels down or to get the horse to do something. By mid-afternoon Lambert was feeling better about giving Adder directions, but he was tired and annoyed with himself. Jorik wasn’t satisfied until Lambert was doing everything _just right_ , and Lambert kept forgetting to do one thing or another. And he was getting sore again.

“Think your leg's up for practice on the dismount? We can break for lunch,” the Witcher said.

Lambert wanted to insist that he could keep going, but the Witcher had been pretty insistent about food before. And maybe he could figure out how to dismount without Jorik lifting him down.

"It's fine," he said. The scratches had been mostly scabbed over when the Witcher had checked them last night, but he'd insisted on wrapping them up again. He brought Adder to a halt at Jorik’s prompting.

“RIght, remember how this works when I’m helping?” the Witcher said.

“Take my feet out of the stirrups, you lift, I swing my leg over her rump,” Lambert said.

“Exactly. Now, when you don’t have someone lifting you, you want to get your right foot out of the stirrup, then brace on the pommel, here,” the Witcher said, tapping at the sticking-up part of the saddle. “You want to lean so that your weight’s supported on your arms, and you can swing your right leg over her rump. Shift one arm to the cantle, the part of the saddle that sticks up at the back, free your left foot, and slide to the ground. Don’t land under her, try not to hang off her side for too long, and make _sure_ your feet are free before you move. I’ll be right here in case anything happens.”

Lambert swallowed. It was a little more complicated than getting lifted down, but he climbed trees all the time. He could do this.

Getting his leg over was pretty simple, and while he had to swap his weight to his left foot while he was moving his grip, he was able to balance and get that foot loose. Sliding down was a little dicier. 

He couldn't help a small sound as the Witcher caught him under the arms right before he landed on his ass in the road.

Adder turned her head and _looked_ at him. He was too embarrassed to move.

"Quite good for a first attempt," the Witcher said, setting him on his feet and taking the reins.

"Trees don't usually curve _out_ like that," Lambert snapped, cheeks burning.

The Witcher looked at him for a moment. "They usually don't," he agreed. “Let’s have lunch and then we can practice a little more.”

Lambert rather grudgingly accepted the halt and the food.

Getting back up on Adder went a little better, even though he had to get a boost so he could reach the stirrup.

“A fence or a stool can help with that too,” the Witcher said once he was seated again. “Now; want to try out moving faster?”

“How do I?” Lambert asked.

“Harder nudge than just the walk. Or another tap once she’s already walking. Try the first one, and if you don’t get it you can try the second.”

It took several repetitions before Lambert could get the right amount of pressure to tell Adder to start out at a faster gait, but he eventually got it down.

The gait itself was faster than Lambert had ever moved in his life, which was _extremely_ unnerving. It wasn’t hard to see that it was probably a speed that would be very useful, though, and the Witcher actually had no trouble keeping up with Adder and Lambert while they ambled down the road. What was more, Jorik kept up for a long time. It was definitely longer than Lambert could trot along himself when the Witcher said “All right, slow her to a walk.”

Lambert pulled back on the reins and both the horse and the Witcher slowed. Neither of them seemed out of breath, either.

“There’s a town up ahead,” the Witcher said. “There’s a ferryman there who should be able to get us across the Buina, then we’re heading north-east off the road again. Want to walk Adder onto the ferry?”

He had to consider that for a minute, but he nodded. 

The wind started picking up and clouds blowing in as they approached the town and the river; branches started rustling loudly in the wind. Lambert had to grab at his hat to keep it from flying away.

The Witcher frowned up at the sky.

“What is it?” Lambert asked.

“Damned unusual to get a storm like this here,” he said, bringing his hand to the snarling wolf medallion he wore for a moment. “Let me have Adder’s reins, will you? I don’t want her to spook.”

Lambert handed the reins to the Witcher, feeling a little unhappy, but a few minutes later when a big gust shook a branch and Adder _danced_ to the side before Jorik stopped her and Lambert had to grab at the pommel, he realized the Witcher’s point.

“Hey now, girl,” the Witcher said, soothingly. “You’ve faced down much scarier than this, it’s only a branch.”

Adder snorted a bit and shook her mane. Lambert wondered if she wasn’t a little embarrassed, maybe. Whether she was or not, she didn’t startle again as they walked to the ferry, despite her posture screaming alertness. 

The ferryman wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of taking them across the river when the storm might break at any moment, but Jorik counted several extra coins into his palm and he grunted and gestured them onto the large flat-bottomed boat. The Witcher lifted Lambert down from Adder first, and gestured that he sit on one of the built-in benches. The water was pretty choppy, and Lambert was glad for the seat; he could cling to the edges of it as hard as he liked.

“Unusual weather you’re having,” the Witcher said to the ferryman.

“Aye, and we’ve been having it on the regular as well, since Belleteyn. Unnatural wet, but crops are doing well enough under it,” the man said.

“That’s certainly for the better,” the Witcher said, but Lambert thought he looked troubled.

They had disembarked from the ferry and curved off into the woods when the sky opened up. The Witcher cursed and dug hastily in his saddlebags until he came up with a large square of oilcloth, which he draped over Lambert and his belongings. Lambert had hunched to protect Zdena when the rain had started, so his front wasn’t that wet, but even under the large cloth he felt a chill.

“Well, looks like travel’s been curtailed for the day,” the Witcher said wryly, glancing up at the sky as Lambert shivered. “We need to find somewhere to camp.”

Lambert was about to protest that he could keep moving, but the Witcher added “It’s not good for Adder to stay wet for a long while,” and, well, Lambert could understand wanting to take care of the horse. It still took a while to find a campsite to the Witcher’s liking; eventually he decided on a patch of bare rock surrounded by trees.

Instead of having Lambert dismount or helping him down, the Witcher asked, “Can you do me a favor and make sure the cloth doesn’t slide off of you and Adder, there?” as he picked up one corner of it.

Lambert nodded and got a grip on the heavy cloth as the Witcher walked over to one of the trees. He realized that the cloth had a metal ring sewn on the corner, through which the Witcher had fed a cord that he was now wrapping around the trunk of the tree, over a meter above his head. Once he finished securing that, he crossed over to the opposite corner and gestured that Lambert could let go. He did, and the Witcher tied off that corner too, which lifted the tarp off of Lambert and Adder almost completely.

The third corner was secured much lower down than the other two, and Jorik actually climbed a little way up a tree to tie off the fourth, which left them under a pretty big sloped shelter. The rain was pattering off of it and little gusts sometimes sent spatters in, but the Witcher had tied the lowest corner so the open side wasn’t facing most of the wind.

“All right,” he said, catching Lambert as he dismounted. “You lay out this—” which was another oilcloth, this one much smaller— “and our bedrolls and get changed into some dry clothes, and I’ll take care of Adder, a fire, and food. Sound good?”

Lambert nodded and took the heavy canvas.

* * *

The Witcher had cleaned and bushed and fed Adder and had food cooking on the sheltered fire under the high edge of the tied oilcloth. He stretched with a sigh, sat down, pulled a comb out of his bags and the tie out of his queue and started combing his hair.

Lambert had helped his mom with her hair, sometimes, but hers wasn’t nearly as thick as the Witcher’s. He was spending a lot more time on it, too, untangling very small snarls and managing to comb out some of the little bits of silver that had been stuck in it.

The Witcher then flipped over most of the hair that was on the right side of his head over to his left, and Lambert saw that he had a huge wavy scar on his scalp. Lambert looked away quickly—it felt rude to stare at it, but then the Witcher started a _braid_ and his eyes were drawn back.

Lambert couldn’t tear his gaze away as the Witcher’s fingers separated his hair into thick, even strands and wove them back together. He kept telling himself it was stupid. Sometimes men had long hair. His dad hadn’t approved, but Lambert knew it was something men did, sometimes.

He’d never seen a man with a _braid_ before.

“The scar’s pretty impressive, huh?” Jorik said, looking over his shoulder at Lambert. Lambert twitched. He hadn’t meant to be caught staring.

“It’s fine, people usually wonder about it,” the Witcher said, lips twitching a little. “The story of how I got it is actually pretty funny, if you want to hear it.”

He wouldn't mind hearing about the scar. It would be a reason to look at the Witcher's braid, anyway. He nodded.

“So, most of the creatures that folk call ‘dragons’ are nothing such,” the Witcher began, his hands not pausing in their task. "And, all except for a single species, they don't breathe fire. That species, slyzards, also tend to live quite a bit further south than other draconids, partially because they were wiped out in Redania—you'll see them in Toussaint, but that's generally as far north as they get.

"I was about twenty, and I had just started out as a Witcher. Like every other twenty-year-old in existence, I was convinced I knew anything worth knowing about absolutely everything, so when a group of villagers in southern Aedirn told me there was a dragon stealing their livestock, I nodded along as they talked about it breathing fire and thought condescendingly about hysteria.

"I tracked the beast down and was in the middle of a huge overhand swing when I noticed that the mouth of what I'd taken to be a hornless forktail—I hadn’t looked at the tail, either—starting to glow. I couldn't dodge, but I _could_ fall over. Kept me from getting it straight to the face, but it got a good chunk of my scalp and part of my arm, too. I managed to kill it, but I had to head back into the town and spend all of the money I’d just earned on a healer. Thank f— thankfully, they had a good one. No permanent nerve damage, just scars, less hair, and a story about how dumb I was.”

“What was the slyzard doing so far north?” Lambert asked.

“I don’t know for sure, but—it was a juvenile male, so I suspect he got kicked out of his mom’s territory and couldn’t find a place of his own. Got chased further and further north by other draconids or people trying to kill him,” Jorik said, tying off the braid.

“Kicked out?” Lambert asked.

“You can only have so many big predators in an area; slyzard mothers will let female chicks hang around, since they’ll help out raising more babies, but males won’t, so they kick them out rather than compete for food with them,” Jorik said.

Lambert considered that. “And that’s why other draconids would have chased him away? Because he was competition?”

“Exactly,” Jorik said.

The Witcher told him a little more about draconids as they ate, and despite it being an earlier night than any of the ones Lambert had had traveling with the Witcher so far, he was yawning by the end of it. The chill and the wet—and, maybe, the riding lessons—had him much more tired than he usually was.

“Go ahead and get some sleep,” Jorik said. “Hopefully this’ll have let up by morning.”

Lambert retreated to his bedroll, which was lying right next to the Witcher’s. It meant they had a lower chance of either of them getting wet and it wasn’t as though he wasn’t used to sleeping next to someone. He burrowed under the blanket and dozed off almost immediately.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jorik: *Heath Ledger Joker*  
> Also, I’m sharing this LOVELY sketch of Jorik by Laurelnose again! https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/622137331619643392/akilah12902-replied-to-your-post-i-love
> 
> (poor baby Lambert. he has no idea that his hairline is going to eventually curse him to look like a ridiculous vampire if he were to grow his hair out.)
> 
> (And yes, the unusual weather will come up again, although not in this fic. I have some Plans.)


	14. Chapter 14

Lambert woke the next morning with his face pressed so hard into Jorik’s chest that he was pretty sure he had creases. It was fine. He’d been cold. Besides, the Witcher didn’t smell anything even approaching as bad as his dad did.

The Witcher woke almost as soon as Lambert shifted, and moved his arm so that Lambert could get up. It had stopped raining, at least. Lambert relieved himself a little ways away from their camp, and returned to breakfast. When Jorik had scraped the last of the porridge out of the bottom of the pot and cleaned it out, they continued on.

Things fell into something of a routine. Traveling with Jorik wasn’t too bad, honestly. The Witcher continued to teach him things during the day, feed him regularly and in abundance, and, since the storm, sleep beside Lambert at night. It was colder in Kaedwen, so he appreciated it. 

It was another four days before they came across another person. They’d been watering Adder at a creek in the morning, and Jorik had seemed a little agitated but unwilling to rush her. Then Lambert had heard running footsteps.

“Witcher!” the running figure called, a little desperately. “Witcher, please—!”

Jorik grimaced slightly and turned to face the man running towards them. When he got near, he had to stop and leaned over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, his tanned face red with exertion.

“We need your help, Witcher,” the man said when he’d caught his breath. “It’s Linnea, my sister— she, but a week to the wedding—”

“Ah,” Jorik said, suddenly looking concerned. “Where’s her wraith?”

“She’s haunting the rye fields— if we can’t lay her to rest, we’ll lose the crop. Please, we don’t have much, but from her dowry, or maybe her fiancé—” the man said.

“I’ll do it,” Jorik said.

Lambert glanced at Jorik. Loss of a whole crop was a terrifying potential, Lambert knew that from his own village, but Jorik didn’t even seem _interested_ in the payment.

“Thank you, Witcher,” the man said, almost in tears.

Jorik made an affirmative noise. “Now, your village?”

“Yes, just this way,” the man said, and gestured back the way he’d come. 

“Tell me more about the situation while we’re walking,” Jorik said as they started moving.

The story sounded more like a fairy tale than anything Lambert had experienced in real life— Linnea, the man’s sister, had been beautiful and kind, and one day she had found a young merchant who had tried to take a shortcut from Ard Carraigh to Buki and who had become lost and injured in the forest.

Since she _was_ kind, Linnea had nursed the man back to health instead of doing anything else, and he had fallen in love with her and she with him. He’d left to tell his friends and family he was alive, and instead of forgetting all about the poor country girl he had had a run of good sales in his business and had returned the next spring with a beautiful amber necklace that he had asked Linnea to accept as an engagement gift. She had, of course, and they had been set to marry in early June, in Linnea’s village with all her family present. The merchant had gone back to the city to return with his friend, who was to be his best man and a witness to the marriage, but just after he had returned—

“She drowned, we think,” Jon, the brother, said. “We’ve been having strange weather of late, and the creek’s been running higher than before. She’d gone out to do laundry, happy and smiling, and—” and there he choked up.

“She didn’t come back,” Jorik completed, quietly. “Do you know where her body is?”

“There’s a pond, just south, that the creek empties into. It’s right by the rye fields— that’s where we’ve been seeing her,” Jon managed.

“I’ll need to talk to her fiancé too,” Jorik said.

“Of course,” Jon said. “He’s still here. He’s mourning her with the rest of us.”

Lambert was more than a little doubtful about that.

* * *

_Okay, maybe I was wrong,_ Lambert thought, looking out the window at the red-eyed and blotchy-faced young man that Jorik had been talking to for several minutes. Linnea’s mother had invited Lambert to sit inside while Jorik talked to her fiancé, and Lambert happened to have a view of the side of the man and his friend from the house. If the fiancé didn’t care, he was doing an _extremely_ good job hiding it. The man, Hans, had told basically the same story as Jon. 

“I’d wanted to go to her,” he said, “and see if she would recognize me, but Edrick told me that if she didn’t recognize her own family…”

Edrick was Hans’ friend, the one Hans had brought to be his best man. He put a pale hand on Hans' shoulder.

“I told him she wouldn’t have wanted him to be hurt trying to get through to her,” he said. He looked like he hadn’t been doing nearly as much crying as Hans had, maybe because he only knew Linnea through stories. “Can you help her move on, Witcher?”

“I should be able to,” Jorik said. “There’ll be something holding her here, and I need to burn it and her body before she’ll leave for good. From your stories...”

“Her necklace,” murmured Hans. “That must be it. She was so _happy—_ ”

Edrick turned his head, and Lambert caught a flash of narrowed eyes and a clenched jaw. That was—

“Was she wearing it that day?” Jorik asked.

“She must have been,” Hans said. “I don’t think she ever took it off.”

Jorik nodded. “There’s a little time until she’s likely to start wandering today. I’ll see if I can finish this before she shows.”

“Thank you,” Hans said.

“Thank you,” Edrick echoed. “Perhaps when she’s finally laid to rest…”

“Edrick, I was planning on taking time to be with her after the wedding,” Hans said. “I can’t just— jump back like nothing’s—”

“I know,” Edrick said, holding up a hand. “But everyone else is going to worry about you too; come back to Buki with me, and let your friends help you.”

“Edrick, maybe,” Hans said. “But first— I can’t possibly leave while Linnea is still—”

“I understand,” Edrick said.

Jorik shifted, and the conversation broke up. The Witcher came into the house and said “Ma’am?”

“Yes?” Linnea’s mother said, drawing away from the oven.

“Would you please look after him while I go to the pond?” Jorik asked, nodding at Lambert.

Lambert, who felt a little annoyed at being spoken of like he wasn’t there, scowled and looked out the window again.

Linnea’s mother assured Jorik that Lambert would be just fine where he was, and Jorik walked off in the direction of the rye fields, leaving Adder tied to the fence by the side of the house. Lambert, determined to act like he _wasn’t_ there, ignored Linnea’s mother when she asked if he wanted to sit by her while she cooked, and she eventually left him alone.

A flicker of movement caught his eye, not too much later. Lambert frowned and leaned out the window a little. It looked like—

Yes, someone was sneaking into the trees. Lambert glanced back at Linnea’s mother, who wasn’t paying any particular attention to him, then to the little square outside the front of the house. Nobody there, either. He made his decision and slipped out of the window and into the woods.

* * *

The person Lambert was following wasn’t at all a woodsman; they were crashing along through the undergrowth like an angry bear. Lambert was pretty sure it was either Hans or Edrick he was following from that alone. The villagers would know at least a little more about how to move quietly in the woods.

Up ahead, the noise came to a halt. Lambert froze, wondering if he’d somehow been detected, but after a moment of nothing started very slowly making his way forward again.

“— _vixen_ ,” he heard as he took cover behind a large patch of dock. “Couldn’t just die and let him move on—”

Ah. It was Edrick, then. Lambert peered out from behind a leaf to see the man groping in a hole in the bole of a tree. He pulled out something that glimmered in the light filtering through the trees, and Lambert felt a chill. It was the necklace. The one that Jorik had said he would need to destroy.

Edrick glared at the necklace for a minute. It was a beautiful piece of jewelry, with a fine golden chain that had three big pieces of golden-orange amber hanging from it. The pieces were almost clear, a far cry from the couple of amber beads Lambert had seen up close before. It looked even prettier than the one the woman in White Bridge had been wearing.

 _He can’t say he found it, he can’t plant it on her body, and he can’t destroy it himself,_ Lambert realized. _He’s stuck, unless he—_

“Well. If he couldn’t keep his hussy of a sister under control,” Edrick muttered, and jammed the necklace into his pocket.

_Unless he frames someone._

Would Jorik come back to the village if he couldn’t find the necklace? Or would he just keep looking for it? ...Would he be able to fight off the wraith without it?

Lambert followed Edrick back through the woods to the village, thinking hard. They weren’t too far away when Lambert heard people calling out.

 _Dammit, they noticed I was gone,_ Lambert realized.

Edrick cursed and swung behind a tree. Lambert saw the gold chain of the necklace was just hanging from the edge of his pocket, after having shifted around while the man was blundering through the woods. Lambert crouched in the brush, watching the glint of the metal. He could run out into the little square, tell them that Edrick had killed Linnea, but they would likely be so distracted by his having slipped away that Edrick would have time to come up with an excuse— or, at least, time to hide the evidence. Add that to his being a good friend of Hans, and he might get away with it. And the longer delay, the more danger there was to Jorik.

Lambert licked his lips and crept closer to Edrick. He hadn’t picked anyone’s pocket before, but he knew it was something you could do. Now didn’t seem like the opportune time to learn, but maybe he could do something else instead. He stopped when he was only a couple of meters away. Edrick was looking away from him, towards the people. Best chance he was going to get.

Lambert burst from his hiding spot and dashed over to punch Edrick as hard as he could in the groin. The man wasn’t expecting it _at all_ , and his yell cut off into a breathless whimper as he curled over. Lambert yanked the necklace from his pocket and ran. He wasn’t going to take the chance that Edrick would recover enough to grab him somehow.

The villagers had noticed him now, though, as he dashed free of the treeline, and he didn’t want to be grabbed by them either. He looked around, frantically, and steered towards where Adder was tied. Most of the way there, he remembered that she didn’t like sudden movements and slowed to as fast a walk as he could. He managed to get to her side before one of the villagers came running over, and he flinched and closed his eyes as they reached for him. There was a snapping noise, and Lambert looked up just in time to see Adder try to bite them again, ears pinned back against her head and hooves tapping.

This was stupidly dangerous, he was fast realizing. And unless he wanted to be grabbed, or to sit and wait until Jorik came back—if he came back—he was going to have to do something even more stupid.

 _Fuck._ Jorik had repeated his advice to not get under Adder for any reason multiple times, so that left back or front as options. Lambert waited until she snapped again and drew her head back up, then slid around her chest, praying to any deity that may or may not exist that she didn’t step on him.

The second he got within reach of the fence, he scrambled up it and used it to get into the saddle. Adder gave him a look and sidled a bit but didn’t seem to object to his being there, which was good. Lambert grabbed the reins and his little knife and pried the knot in the rope attached to her bridle loose, shoved his knife back in his pocket, and gave her a light kick.

Adder seemed very pleased for the opportunity to get closer to the villagers, and Lambert had to pull back on the reins to keep her from running them over. Thankfully, they got the picture and moved out of the way, and Adder was happy enough to make a break for the rye fields instead, Lambert clinging desperately to her with the necklace clenched tight in his fist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are moving along!


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry if you thought last chapter was the cliffhanger.

Lambert slowed Adder down a bit once they were clear—not to a walk, but definitely slower than she’d started. They’d said the wraith showed up by the pond, so Lambert kept the creek in sight and followed it along. He wanted to turn around to see if he was being chased, but he wasn’t sure how Adder would react to that, and he didn’t want to find out. People were yelling, but they weren’t getting _louder_. He was probably fine. Probably.

The rye was swaying but he couldn’t feel a breeze, and Lambert swallowed, hoping he wasn’t about to be attacked by an angry noonwraith. His dad didn’t have a field at his village, but you heard farmers talking every so often, about how noonwraiths would drag farmers into a dance and keep them going until they died from exhaustion, or strike them down with scorching heat, or every so often just slice them to bits. He couldn’t help looking from side to side as he rode, looking for a flash of white cloth.

He didn’t see anything for the couple of minutes it took for him to get into sight of the pond. Jorik was standing, sword drawn and dripping wet, next to a slumped shape that Lambert abruptly realized was probably Linnea’s body. There was a heat haze shimmering all around them. The Witcher’s head was turned towards the road Adder and Lambert were on, but he abruptly jerked around as the heat haze suddenly solidified into a floating figure.

Lambert twitched as the wraith, screaming shrilly, took a swing at Jorik, and then had to grab the saddle pommel as Adder abruptly stopped with a snort and danced around for several seconds. Lambert couldn’t blame her, honestly.

Jorik didn’t appear to have been hit, though, and he made a gesture that caused a ring of purple light to show up around him and the wraith.

“Lambert, get out of here!” Jorik yelled, slashing the wraith.

“I have the necklace!” Lambert yelled back.

Jorik rolled out of the way of a slash from the wraith and looked at him over his shoulder. He seemed surprised.

“Throw it towards me, then!” he called.

Lambert untangled his fingers from the chain of the necklace and tried to ignore the sounds of people approaching behind him, steadily getting louder. As he was reaching back to throw, though, the wraith disappeared and then reappeared right next to the Witcher, ready to swing.

“ _Jorik_!” Lambert screamed, and the Witcher immediately threw himself to the side, only just avoiding the noonwraith’s swipe.

“Throw it and go back towards town!” Jorik said once he’d recovered his footing.

Lambert chucked the necklace as hard as he could towards Jorik, and the Witcher actually managed to catch it midair. He started running for the corpse near the pond, and the wraith shrieked in rage and started floating after him.

Lambert wheeled Adder around, a direction she seemed happy to take, and flinched as he saw what looked like half the village on the road. He wasn’t sure if he’d rather face them or the wraith, honestly. Adder decided for him and advanced, and the villagers drew backwards, clearly nervous of the horse.

“What’s _happened_?” one of them asked. Lambert realized, after a few moments, that it was Jon.

He swallowed and said “Edrick had Linnea’s necklace.”

A wave of startled murmuring spread, but Lambert was turning in the saddle to look back to the fight, heart in his mouth. Adder circled with him, and he saw Jorik deliver a heavy hit to the noonwraith, sending it reeling. The Witcher took advantage of the moment to place the necklace onto Linnea’s body and cast Igni. Or at least, Lambert _thought_ it was Igni—but instead of a quick flash of fire, it was a prolonged stream of flame. The body caught fire, despite the puddle of water that had gathered beneath it and the water that still dripped from its clothes, and the noonwraith screamed so loudly that Lambert had to clap his hands over his ears and then swap to grabbing the saddle as Adder leaped backwards.

Jorik pressed his attack as the wraith recoiled from the fire, his silver sword gleaming as he cut into the ghostly figure. Lambert couldn’t help but compare to the nekkers—a single swing wasn’t enough to take down the noonwraith like it had been with them, but the fluid cuts were very similar. Jorik tended to slash in threes before moving away from the wraith to avoid a counterattack; his lightning-quick movements allowed him to get in several hits to the noonwraith’s single attempts.

The wraith shrieked again in clear anger, and delivered a flurry of blows in Jorik’s direction, but he sidestepped them with an ease that looked like it was born of long experience. He managed to keep the wraith within the glowing circle, and hit it again with his sword as its last swing collided with air.

Lambert became aware that he was leaning forwards in the saddle when Adder took a couple hesitant steps forward and then danced backwards again. He straightened up as swiftly as he could and patted her neck in apology.

Jorik darted in and out of range of the wraith like a dragonfly over a pond, the specter never quite managing to connect a hit while he was in her range. Finally he sent another wave of flames at the corpse and necklace, which were starting to die out, and took advantage of the scream to get in another couple of hits.

Once those were ash, though, Jorik suddenly changed his style. Instead of evading blows, he blocked or parried, and advanced relentlessly against the noonwraith, landing solid hits so rapidly that the wraith stopped being able to attack. He kept darting to the side, as well, to keep the wraith within the circle of light he had conjured.

Shortly after Jorik switched from what had surely been defense to offense, the wraith gave a last pitiful cry and dissolved into light. Jorik stood a moment longer with his sword ready before relaxing slightly and turning to the ashes by the pond, turning them over with the tip of his sword.

He sheathed the silver sword and walked over with a rather wry look on his face. “I can’t say I’m used to an audience.”

“The boy said Edrick had Linnea’s engagement necklace,” said one of the villagers.

Lambert forced himself not to flinch. It was _true_. 

Jorik carefully took Adder’s bridle and stroked her. “Lambert? You said you had the necklace, but you didn’t have much time to explain.”

Lambert licked his lips. He wasn’t completely sure where to start, but— “I saw someone sneaking into the woods after you left. I followed them.” That was a regular level of suspicious, right?

“A _child_ followed someone?” asked a villager.

“They weren’t a good woodsman,” Lambert said, maybe a little too loud. “He made so much noise I probably didn’t need to bother with sneaking.”

Jorik tipped his head up slightly, eyes fixed on Lambert. He didn’t seem suspicious, at least. Just—interested.

“It was Edrick. He stopped at a hollow tree and took the necklace out. Said that Linnea was a— vixen, and that she should have just died and let Hans move on,” Lambert continued. Adder shifted under him, and he sat up straighter. “Then he said if ‘he’ couldn’t keep his—”

“Go on,” said a woman.

“If he couldn’t keep his hussy of a sister under control—” Lambert spilled out, all at once. He’d known what Edrick meant, but adults never wanted to believe kids about anything. “And he put the necklace in his pocket and started back towards the village.”

“How did you get the necklace from him?” Jorik asked, still just interested.

“People noticed I was gone,” Lambert said. “Edrick stopped in the woods by the outskirts. He was— distracted.”

Jorik nodded, his eyes still on Lambert.

“So I hit him and grabbed the necklace,” Lambert made himself say. “And I knew you needed it, so I took Adder so I could get it to you.”

“And unless someone else had a gold and amber necklace, that was Linnea’s,” Jorik said, looking at the villagers. “She didn’t have her engagement necklace on her, and I spent time looking for it in the pond and creekbed and couldn't find it.”

There was general murmuring from the assembly.

"Did Hans know—" someone said.

"From what Lambert heard, probably not," Jorik said.

The murmuring was starting to take on an angry tone.

"How about you head back and speak with them before anything else," Jorik said, calm and serious.

“What else do we need to know!” one said. “That merchant’s friend killed Linnea!”

Lambert saw Jorik close his eyes for a moment.

“Very well,” he said, and started walking away from the village, leading Adder. The villagers started going the other direction, conversation buzzing like angry bees.

Lambert watched Jorik while he walked. His shoulders were tight and his jaw was clenched.

“Jorik?” Lambert asked, and the Witcher’s gaze flicked to him. “Did I…?”

“You did a good thing, kid. I’m just worried that it’s going to turn ugly,” Jorik said softly.

“Master Witcher!” called someone, running after them.

Lambert turned his head to see that it was Jon.

Jorik didn’t stop walking, but he tilted his head slightly.

“Your payment, we—”

“You don’t have to pay me,” Jorik said.

“You saved so many lives, laying my sister to rest,” the man insisted. “We have to repay you somehow.”

Jorik stopped walking abruptly, to a snort of displeasure from Adder.

“You can repay me by making sure that your village doesn’t harm Hans,” he almost snapped.

Lambert’s jaw dropped, slightly. So did Jon’s.

“What?” Jon said. “It’s not his fault, he loved Linnea as much as we did—”

“Yes, but someone needs to point that out before he becomes ‘the one responsible for you losing her’,” Jorik said. “They were already starting, didn’t you hear? ‘That merchant’s friend’. I can’t ask you to keep Edrick unhurt, when he’d probably be facing a headsman anyway if he was tried in a city, but if you blame the man who loved her—”

Jon swallowed hard. “I couldn’t ever,” he said.

“Then you should go and tell them that,” Jorik said, a little more calmly.

“I will,” Jon said. “Thank you for your help, Master Witcher.”

Jorik gave him a nod, and the man turned and started running back in the direction of the village as Lambert watched with wide eyes.

It took him a while before he could work up the courage to ask. “Do you think he’ll manage?”

Jorik sighed. “I think he might be able to. He was well-liked there too, in addition to being the brother of the girl. That will help to get people to listen to him.”

Lambert took another minute. “And they wouldn’t listen to you, if you asked?”

Jorik gave him a sidelong glance. “Probably they wouldn’t have. I’m an outsider. How could I possibly know better than them?”

“You knew better than them on how to deal with a noonwraith,” Lambert said grumpily.

Jorik snorted in surprised amusement. “Somehow people always conveniently forget that.”

“That’s so stupid,” Lambert said. “And why would he have come all the way back here just to get her killed? He could have just stayed away.”

“People aren’t always reasonable, kid,” Jorik said, and the corners of his mouth fell again.

Lambert didn’t quite dare to speak up again, after that. Jorik kept almost-frowning the whole rest of the day, and he seemed—distracted, a little. When he was grooming Adder that evening, she actually nudged him hard enough to make him stumble. Nothing happened until after they’d eaten, though.

“Lambert, I need to tell you something,” Jorik said softly, after he had measured peas and water into the chavunok and buried it in the coals. A chill ran down Lambert’s spine. That tone of voice was a bad one. It wasn’t even quite anything aural, it was just a _feeling_ that told him this wasn’t going to be anything good.

He sat back down and looked at Jorik.

“Lambert, I think you would be an excellent Witcher. You’re intelligent, you’re good at making decisions under pressure and you have the reflexes to back them up, and unless I missed my guess, you’ve been enjoying learning about monsters, right?”

Lambert couldn’t move, waiting for the axe to drop. For Jorik to tell him that he _should_ be a Witcher. He _had_ been enjoying it. More than he might have ever suspected. And Jorik was— important. Even though he had— he was _important_.

“But the thing about becoming a Witcher—” Jorik paused. “Our lives are incredibly dangerous. And that starts with the mutations.”

The chill came back abruptly, and brought numbness with it.

“Boys undergo them no later than about ten years old— and on average— only three out of ten of them live through it. They were— the most pain I’ve ever been in in my _life_ was undergoing that.”

“And you’re going to do that to me,” Lambert said, calmly but loudly, over the roaring in his ears.

“I wasn’t— I didn’t even know if you’d _fit_ as a Witcher when I met you!” J— _the Witcher_ looked stricken. “And I’m not just going to _dump_ you at Kaer Morhen without asking you if—”

Lambert stood up, feeling dazed, and turned around. He needed— something, but he needed time to _think_ —

“Lambert, wait,” the _Witcher_ said, reaching a hand out.

Lambert flinched away from it and _hissed_. “ _Don’t **touch** me, **Witcher!**_ ”

The hand twitched back and Lambert dashed for the nearest pine, clawing his way up the rough bark. He couldn’t— no. He _should_ have known better. He should have known the Witcher didn’t actually care.

People were _always_ hypocrites.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh dear. Well, we knew it couldn’t last forever.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know the books mention Geralt and Eskel being thrashed for tormenting an animal, but I’m writing fanfic, canon is what I want it to be. (The topic is brought up and Lambert is told in no uncertain terms that corporal punishment is not used at Kaer Morhen.)

Jorik stood near the fire, trying not to stare into the boughs of the tree Lambert had fled into. That had gone… about as badly as it could have possibly gone, bar someone getting killed or maimed.

But he’d been so _proud_ of the kid. He was _good_ at this, intelligent and clever with it, and he seemed like he’d _enjoyed_ it, enjoyed learning about monsters or hearing about Jorik’s potions or solving problems. Lambert _could_ be a really good Witcher, if he wasn’t too old for the training. If he didn’t die during the Trials.

If Jorik hadn’t just completely shattered any trust the kid had in Witchers.

He couldn’t have _not_ told him. Keeping the death rate secret until they were at Kaer Morhen—Lambert would have fought tooth and nail against becoming a Witcher, just for that.

_And he would have **never** trusted me if I’d told him earlier._

Jorik scowled. That shouldn’t have mattered; you didn’t have to have people’s trust to look after them. That was proved almost daily, as a Witcher. And while it had been—nice, talking with the kid, having him get close in his sleep—he didn't _need_ it. He would take care of the kid as best as he could, with or without it.

The more immediate problem was that he didn't know if Lambert could sleep in a tree without falling out of it, but he almost certainly wasn't coming down while Jorik was still awake. Jorik ran his tongue over his teeth for a moment and thought, before moving Lambert's bedroll over to the tree and returning to his own. 

"Please don't fall asleep up there," he said, and laid down facing away from the tree. He could hear the kid breathing in harsh little pants up there, probably crying, but, at least for the moment, he wasn't going anywhere. He did end up hearing the kid climb down, a couple of hours later, and curl up on the bedroll. He sighed quietly in relief, and he fell asleep shortly after.

* * *

Jorik woke the next morning when he heard Lambert get up. He rolled over, strapped on his swords, and pulled the chavunok out of the remains of the fire.

 _What’s he doing?_ Jorik thought as he heard Lambert wandering around within a rough twenty-meter radius of the camp.

The kid came walking back a good twenty minutes later with an armful of plants and a few roots, which he put down on his bedroll before heading over to the saddlebags and taking out one of the jars his mother had packed. He sat down on the bedroll, cracked the jar—pickled eggs, from the smell—and started eating the food he’d collected while staring right at Jorik.

Jorik had to blink at him a few times while he tried to ignore the little stab. He didn’t want to waste the porridge, so he started eating as well. The silence continued past breakfast. When the time came to mount up and get moving, Lambert walked right past Jorik and climbed up onto a slightly precarious-looking outcrop of stone and glared until Jorik led Adder over. Jorik had to debate with himself for a minute over whether or not he trusted Lambert with the reins right now.

He eventually decided he would let Lambert steer, under the pretense of more riding lessons. The kid was even more focused on getting everything right than Jorik had noticed before, and he still wouldn’t speak. He was completely exhausted by the time they stopped, probably compounded by his not eating anything at midday.

He dismounted with gritted teeth and made to march off into the woods. Jorik stopped him.

“Lambert. Sit down.”

The kid gave him the most baleful glare yet, but half-collapsed to the ground.

“I was trying to tell you, last night. Unless you’re _willing_ to try and train for a Witcher, I won’t say a word of it to the training masters,” Jorik said. “I told you, before, it’s ten or younger, and there’s training _beforehand_. If I don’t recommend you, they’ll say you’re too old. But I don’t _have_ a list of people who can be trusted to look after a child—I’m wandering the Continent seven months a year. They do.”

“Why should I believe a word you say, _Witcher?_ ” Lambert spat, his first spoken words the whole day. Jorik twitched a little at the kid using his vocation as an invective. Stupid of him, it wasn’t like that was _new_ —

“Because I’ve tried not to lie to you so far?” Jorik said, a little wearily. “Because Witchers need to actually be willing to do their jobs, and even if I did talk you up so that they wanted to try the preliminary training, you’d just have to be hostile and refuse to do the work and it would all go to pieces anyways?”

“And see if I can last through the thrashings?” the kid asked nastily.

“None of us beat children,” and dammit, he was _still_ incensed with Lambert’s father about that, “Doing more exercises, running the Gauntlet, extra kitchen work or emptying chamberpots—there’s no _point_ in punishing anyone by hurting them, it’s not _useful_ , even apart from it being exactly the kind of reaction we want to avoid cultivating.”

Lambert closed his mouth and glared for a little while, but Jorik could tell he was thinking that over. After another minute of silence, Jorik started unsaddling Adder. The kid got up and helped when he started grooming her, then stood there petting her with a look of serious concentration.

“Lambert, I’m going to collect some wood and then hunt,” Jorik said quietly. Lambert still twitched as he was jarred out of his thoughts.

The kid still didn’t look at him, but Jorik figured he had heard, and he headed off into the trees.

* * *

Jorik returned about three-quarters of an hour later, with a large stack of firewood and two cleaned rabbits. He’d eaten most of the viscera, the way he usually did, and burned what he preferred not to eat when he had a choice. Lambert had cleared space for a fire, laid out the bedrolls, and had collected a small pile of ramsons and chickweed. He was swaying slightly where he stood.

“Have a seat before you fall over, kid,” Jorik said, and Lambert collapsed on his bedroll, almost too tired to glare.

“Can I use these, or are they for you?” he asked, nodding to the greens.

“Use ‘em,” Lambert said.

Jorik eyed the kid, who was only barely keeping his eyes open, and said, “I’ll wake you when the food is ready.”

He almost thought that Lambert might try to stay awake out of sheer contrariness, but once he was lying down he was out within minutes. Since the kid hadn’t eaten much for most of the day, Jorik decided he’d go a little more elaborate. When the fire was ready, he cut the rabbits up and browned them while digging through his bag of dried food for mushrooms and a couple other vegetables, then added those and some water and a bit of salt to the chavunok, along with most of the ramsons. He had a bit of bread left, too, so he dug that out.

While he was waiting for everything to cook, he went over his gear again. He’d sharpened and oiled the silver sword last night while he’d been preparing their dinner, but there wasn’t any harm in checking everything again.

Around the time that the stew was done, he heard Lambert stirring; possibly from the smell of it, which had escaped in a great gust when Jorik had carefully removed the lid with one of his knives to add the last of the ramsons to the pot.

"Hey," he said. "Just about done."

Lambert watched the pot warily, like he wasn’t sure it was safe. Jorik resisted the urge to sigh, and instead scooped up a bunch of the stew with a tin mug, used his knife to add a couple pieces of rabbit, and handed it to Lambert along with the bread and most of the chickweed.

The kid ate voraciously but neatly, hunched over the cup like someone was going to take it from him—the way he _usually_ did, Jorik realized. The clear challenge from that morning had stuck out for more than one reason, it seemed. Jorik carefully ate even slower than he had been, and gave Lambert seconds and then thirds until he’d had most of an entire rabbit and was starting to fall asleep again.

“Should I start breakfast?” Jorik asked him.

Lambert stared at him blearily, but shook his head. Jorik ran his tongue over his teeth again, but nodded. The kid dropped off again almost immediately. Jorik considered not listening for a couple of minutes, but ignoring the kid’s wishes wasn’t the way to convince him that Jorik wasn’t going to try and force him into other things. So he ate the rest of the stew, bones included, made sure the pot was clean, and laid down to sleep.

The next morning, he pretended to be asleep while the kid dragged himself out of bed and went to gather more food. He got up when the kid came back to camp and sat down with the remains of his pickled eggs. He carefully took extra time with the morning chores so Lambert didn’t rush eating, but this morning Lambert was done well before he usually was. Rather than speed up and potentially end up letting on, Jorik kept to the pace he’d set.

The day again passed in mostly silence, although Jorik was fairly certain Lambert was feeling slightly less malevolent. He accepted a couple strips of jerky at midday, anyway, and two of the roach that Jorik caught in a stream off the Gwenllech that evening. They were only about a day out from Ard Carraigh, and while Jorik wasn’t sure he wanted to bring the kid though yet another big city, the most accessible road was on the north bank of the river. 

* * *

The next morning, when the kid refused breakfast again, he decided that they’d stay overnight at an inn in the city. He might be able to get some more food into Lambert that way. He hadn’t gained enough weight while they were traveling that Jorik felt comfortable letting him essentially skip a meal daily. Jorik could afford to burn some body fat—Lambert really couldn’t.

“Ard Carraigh,” he said as they approached the bridge over the Gwenllech that evening. “High Rock, in Elder.”

Lambert wasn’t quite schooled enough to keep all of his astonishment off his face; he was so clearly unused to cities, and still wasn’t sure how to react. Jorik, sensing that he might be able to talk more without being glared at and eager to press the advantage, added, “Capital city of Kaedwen.”

Lambert turned his head to look at Jorik, eyes wide.

“The castle at the top there belongs to King Benda,” Jorik said, gesturing. “He just had another daughter, Elaine, a few years back. I think he’s currently in talks about betrothing her to the Cintran prince.”

Something about that sentence lost him the kid’s wide-eyed look, and he was left with a glare again. He hid a sigh and led Adder across the bridge, adding “We’re staying at an inn tonight.”

The Cat’s Eye inn was near the easternmost gate of the city. Witchers tended to frequent it despite the name because it was clean, offered good food in large portions, and didn’t charge nearly as much for its private rooms as other inns did. The innkeep made a small fortune on drinks for people who came in looking for a Witcher, too, which kept them thriving.

Rather than potentially get ambushed by someone with a contract, Jorik left Adder unharnessed in the stable and carried all of the gear and saddlebags around to the back door of the inn. Lambert stuck pretty close to him, probably because he trusted everyone else even less than he did Jorik.

The innkeep blinked at them when they came in, but nodded in understanding when Jorik said “I’m trying for a quiet evening.”

A room, the stabling, and two meals for two cost him a good chunk of the money he had left, but he wasn’t expecting to need it beyond Ard Carraigh. The room was a little more like a closet, with a narrow but long bed, small fireplace and hearth, and just enough floor space to put down his saddlebags and other gear, with a bit left over for a bedroll. Lambert stood on the hearth, out of the way, without prompting. His forehead was still furrowed in a frown but he looked like he was about to fall asleep standing up.

“You can sit on the bed,” Jorik said to him after lighting the fire. “I’m going to go get our food.”

Dinner turned out to be pottage with barley, assorted vegetables—Jorik smelled carrots, beets, and onions—pepper, and oxtail, bread, and mugs of kwass flavored with lingonberries. While he was in the kitchen, Jorik noticed the innkeep’s wife had baked miodownik, and managed to get a piece of that as well for another coin. He balanced that plate on his arm and went back towards the room, only to stop short when he heard Lambert talking. He didn’t exactly want to interrupt—but he also didn’t like the idea of standing awkwardly in the hallway until the kid was done. Ruling in favor of hot food, he walked over to the door as quickly as he could and lightly kicked the bottom. 

“Hey, Lambert, can you let me in? My hands are full,” he said. 

The talking stopped and about half a minute later Lambert swung open the door. He’d clearly been crying a little, but Jorik wasn’t about to comment. The food went onto the hearth, and he handed Lambert the cake.

“Figured you might want some of that,” he said, then sat down on the bedroll and picked up his bowl of pottage. It was really quite good, and he probably could have finished it in record time, but he ate slowly for the kid’s sake.

Lambert ate his bowl of pottage first, but his eyes went _huge_ when he tasted the miodownik, and he started taking large bites of it. Jorik had to bite his cheek to stop from laughing a little. 

Eventually, Jorik drank the last of his kwass and yawned. “You should take the bed, kid.”

Lambert gave him a long, suspicious look, but eventually climbed into it. Jorik closed the shutters on the single window and lay down on his bedroll. The kid seemed to be trying to stay awake, but he dropped off to sleep before too long. Jorik lay there listening to his breathing for a little while longer, wishing the kid didn’t have to decide between probable death or being dumped on a strange family because Jorik had been incapable of keeping his damn fool mouth shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since there’s someone relatively famous with the last name miodownik, I’ve included a link to a recipe. Kwass is the Polish word for kvass, a drink made from fermented rye bread. (non-alcoholic, too!) https://journeyfromapolishkitchen.com/2015/12/05/miodownik-piernik-honey-spice-cake/


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may want to queue this up when they start up into the Blue Mountains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJuPBBw-l-M

Lambert wasn’t _stupid_. He knew he wasn’t familiar with cities, that J— _the Witcher_ had made them stop so he could keep Lambert from going foraging in the morning. He wasn’t sure if the Witcher just wanted him dependent or if he was delaying the man in the mornings somehow. And making him sleep in the bed—he wouldn’t be able to sneak downstairs and see if he could buy anything with the couple of pennies that he had.

He was actually kind of mad about that. The cake had tasted _really good_.

But the Witcher woke up right after he did, and after he’d stretched he turned to Lambert and said “Privies are in the back courtyard,” and went downstairs on his own.

Lambert sat for a moment before making good on the Witcher’s recommendation. On his way back in, he smelled food cooking, and cautiously poked his nose around the corner to see an older white woman at a huge oven, stirring something in a pot. She paused to stretch and wipe her face with the towel in her hand, and he didn’t quite duck out of the way quickly enough.

“Oh,” she said. “Are you the boy traveling with the Witcher? You look half starved, no wonder he bargained for that piece of my miodownik.”

Lambert blinked a few times, a little thrown by the rapid judgement.

“Well, I’ve sent him back up with two bowls of my porridge, but—” she continued, seemingly unconcerned by his silence, and turned to the side. “I think I can come up with a little extra for a hungry boy.”

She cut various things at a counter set into the wall next to the stove and handed him an entire roll, the size of his hand, that had been cut in half and filled with what looked like sausage and cheese and tomatoes. 

“Run along, now. I’m sure your Witcher will want to be on the road early,” she said, with a slight smile, and waved her hand at him in a shooing motion.

Lambert left with it before she could change her mind, and started eating as he went. He walked back into the room licking the last of the tomato juice off his wrist, where it had dripped.

“There you are,” J—the Witcher said, and held out a bowl of porridge.

Lambert looked at it for a moment. The sandwich would probably hold him over just fine, but—the Witcher had _paid_ for this already. He took the bowl, and thought he saw the Witcher’s expression lighten. He ignored that and started eating, as quickly as he could. The Witcher started packing things up to get ready to go. When he had everything together from the room, Lambert was only half-done with his food.

“I’m going to head down and check Adder over, get her saddled,” the Witcher said. “It’ll probably take a little while. Come down when you’re finished?”

Lambert nodded cautiously, mouth full of porridge. As Jorik left he slowed down his eating pace a bit, stopping to taste it a little. It was really, really good; savory instead of sweet like the Temple’s had been, and he thought there might be egg in it. After he’d scraped the bowl clean, he headed back down to the kitchen and handed it to the woman there, who smiled at him and gave him another sandwich wrapped in a scrap of cloth. He nodded at her, awkwardly, stuffed the sandwich into his jacket, and went into the stables, where J—the Witcher was finishing brushing Adder’s mane.

“Ready? We have a long way to go today,” he said, and Lambert nodded. The Witcher led Adder over to a mounting block, Lambert climbed on, and off they went.

* * *

Lambert wasn’t quite as tired as he’d been the past couple of days when they finally stopped for the evening, but it wasn’t for lack of the Witcher trying. They’d traveled past nightfall, without even the usual midday halt for lunch, and the Witcher had led Adder while murmuring to her almost the whole last hour. Eventually he’d led her off the road and into the woods, halting her when they came to a small clearing and then building the wood he’d spent most of the afternoon picking up into a shape for a fire. Lambert dismounted and looked at the Witcher a little blearily as he lit the wood with Igni.

“Good job today, kid,” the Witcher said. “I know it was tough going, but this way you’ll get to sleep indoors tomorrow night and we’ll be able to get a start up into the mountains when we’re well-rested.”

Lambert decided not to comment and just patted Adder’s nose. She leaned happily into the touch as the Witcher unloaded her and gave her a quick rubdown.

“I’m going to go hunt. I’ll give her a proper grooming when I get back,” the Witcher said. “Will you set up bedrolls and watch the fire?”

Lambert waited just a little bit before nodding, looking right in J—the Witcher’s night-eyes the whole time. He would cooperate, but he didn’t want the Witcher to think that he was doing it because he _liked_ him or something. The Witcher nodded back and headed off into the woods.

The Witcher groomed Adder while the rabbits he’d caught were cooking, and lay down to sleep immediately after they’d eaten. 

Lambert was actually woken by the Witcher the next morning, as the sky was just starting to turn gray with light. 

“Mmm?” he managed.

“Sorry, we need an early start,” the Witcher said. “If you want breakfast it’ll have to be dried food.”

“Mm,” Lambert said, and started rolling up the bedroll while yawning. He was basically awake by the time he mounted Adder, and after some consideration said “Yes.”

Jorik handed him the bag of dried food with a bit of a smile, and Lambert ate while Adder walked.

Even with their early start it was dark by the time they got to a small village right near a river valley heading up into the mountains. The people there didn’t seem to be any more surprised or upset to see a Witcher and a boy together than the innkeep and his wife from Ard Carraigh, and put them up in their own inn. Lambert managed a large bowl of pottage and fell asleep almost immediately after he put his spoon down.

* * *

The next morning he woke on his own, which he definitely preferred. Jorik wasn’t in the room, and Lambert cautiously got up and went into the main part of the inn looking for him. It turned out the Witcher was sitting at one of the long benches in the big room with another bowl of pottage, talking to the innkeep.

The Witcher noticed him, of course, and had another bowl filled and put down next to him. Lambert, having seen the steep path heading up into the mountains, sat down and started eating.

“—Weather’s been good,” the innkeep said. “Haven’t heard about any rockslides, so the path should be clear.”

“Thank you,” the Witcher said. “Lambert, I’m going to go make sure Adder’s ready.”

Lambert nodded and turned back to his bowl.

The path into the mountains was _hard_. They were almost constantly going up, and the Witcher sometimes had Lambert dismount to walk Adder up some of the worse sections of the trail they were on. Lambert was probably as exhausted as he’d ever been on their trip, and sometimes his sleep was disturbed by wolves howling at night—though, whenever he woke, Jorik was always sitting up with a glimmering eye already cracked open. It got colder and colder the further up they traveled, and Lambert moved his bedroll back next to Jorik’s on the second night. He wasn’t dumb enough to freeze just because he was angry with the Witcher.

Three days in, they crossed the river at a shallow ford. Lambert was expecting to be bitten by bugs all that night, but the clouds of gnats stuck close to the rushing water.

“Too cold for a lot of them right now,” Jorik said when he asked. “Late this month and all of next you’ll get eaten alive, but they have a very short season compared to what you’ll see in Temeria.”

Lambert nodded slowly, considering.

The fourth day, they were walking through a small wooded area when Lambert heard shouting. It was wordless, but it was clearly human. He shot a look at Jorik, but the Witcher didn’t seem concerned. Before too long, they crossed what looked like another path—one that other kids were running on. One of the boys, younger than Lambert and pale, with dark hair and eyes, stopped and stared at Lambert and Jorik. Lambert couldn’t help but stare back.

After a moment, another, older boy with dark brown skin and tight, curly hair slowed and put his hand on the younger boy’s shoulder.

“—need to keep moving,” Lambert heard him say.

The younger boy started off again, and the older turned to look at them before running off himself—but Lambert would swear that he’d seen a flash of yellow in the older boy’s eyes.

 _Ten or younger,_ he thought. _He was mutated already. He lived._

The sun was setting as they came across another shallow ford in the river. Lambert was so tired by that point that it wasn’t until Jorik murmured “Kaer Morhen,” that he looked up.

They were approaching a _castle_ , set into the side of a mountain. Huge walls and towers made of gray stone rose into the air, and to Lambert it looked almost as grand as King Benda’s castle in Ard Carraigh. They finally left the river and took a path headed up the side of the peak, approaching the massive structure. The path up seemed designed to take you past most of the walls, and Lambert stared at the walkways far above his head as they continued along. 

They eventually came to a bridge across a deep ravine filled with water. There was a huge lattice-like gate made of metal that was held up and open somehow at the other end of the bridge, and Jorik led them across and under, into the first set of castle walls. The tunnel ended in another gate leading into a large courtyard with a well in it, with a big roofed building at one end. Jorik led Adder into it, and Lambert realized that it was a stable; there were other horses in it, in more colors than he’d seen even in the cities they’d gone through.

Lambert dismounted when Jorik nodded, and the Witcher unsaddled Adder and got her comfortable in one of the many empty stalls. The two of them then left the stables and headed up along a walkway that curved around a second interior wall. Lambert heard metal clanging from somewhere as they walked by another set of buildings, but Jorik didn’t go into them or stop, instead going up another set of stairs to _another_ latticed gate, an entrance into the space enclosed by the second set of walls.

Once they were though that, it was just another few sets of stairs and they were at the gigantic wooden doors into the castle itself. Jorik pushed on one. The huge door swung open easily and Lambert felt his jaw drop a little more as they walked into a _massive_ hall. There were a dozen or more long tables and benches set up along both sides of the enormous room, and there were bright murals painted on the walls. The one they were walking towards had a _dragon_ on it, and he stared at the colorful creature until Jorik led him past it and up a long, long set of curving stairs. They just kept going up and up, past a landing, all the way to the top of what must be one of the huge towers. Eventually, they reached an open doorway into a large, circular room with a fireplace right in the center. Three men were standing around a table near the wall furthest from the door. All three of them were looking at Jorik and Lambert. 

“Master Rennes, Master Barnim, Hieronymus,” Jorik said, nodding to each of them in turn.

Rennes and Barnim were Witchers, with two swords and slit-pupiled eyes, but Hieronymus wasn’t. Lambert frowned a little, trying to figure out why he was here.

“Ah,” Rennes said. “Hieronymous, will you call in Varin and Vesemir? I believe the others are occupied.”

Lambert felt his eyes pop when the man’s hands glowed. He could do _magic_. Several minutes later, two more Witchers walked into the room. They were both white and had dark brown hair that was just starting to go gray, but one’s hair was short and the other’s was long. They both looked at the assembly and went to stand by the other three men, facing Lambert and Jorik.

“Masters, this is Lambert. My Child Surprise,” Jorik said, hand brushing against Lambert’s shoulder.

Lambert stayed planted right where he was. He did not want to be the center of attention of a bunch of adults, and, failing that, he wanted to stay right next to the one who had at least tried to keep him alive so far. 

“And so you’ve brought him to us, Jorik,” said Rennes.

“We could always use more candidates,” said Barnim, with a rather grim twist to his mouth.

“Forgive me,” said Hieronymous. “How old is the boy?”

Lambert glared and said nothing. He wasn’t fond of being called ‘boy’.

“Lambert is nine,” Jorik said. 

Everyone present stilled for a moment.

“Lose track of the years, Jorik?” asked the Witcher with the short brown hair.

“I asked for the first thing his father saw when he came home,” Jorik said, his tone flat. “I’m not so addled as that.”

“And so you bring him _here_ , instead of leaving him at the Temple?” the short-haired Witcher asked with a sneer. 

“Varin,” Rennes said warningly. “You _know_ not everyone fits at the Temple.”

Varin rolled his eyes. “I understand, Rennes, but those cases are few and far between. I’ll not have him here, in any case—the boy’s too old, and too cowardly besides.”

“ _Cowardly?_ ” Lambert snapped. Being discussed like he was a sack of grain wasn’t exactly new, but the dismissal from the short-haired Witcher made his blood boil.

“You’re hiding behind Jorik with your tail tucked between your legs, runt, what else would I call you?” Varin asked.

“Varin, if you think he’s not capable of keeping up with the training, there’s no need to shame him for it,” said the other brown-haired Witcher, who must be Vesemir.

That just made Lambert angrier, and he took another few steps into the room, clenching his fists. “Keeping _up_? I ‘kept up’ with Jorik halfway across the damn _Continent_!”

“With _him_?” Varin said derisively. “I’m sure you kept up, Jorik’s been a soft touch from the start. But you won’t be with the boys who have been doing this for years already under my eye.”

“I wouldn’t just _keep up_ ,” Lambert hissed. “I’d do _better_ than the lot of them!”

“Then why don’t you _prove it_? Learn with the other trainees for four months, ‘till Jorik comes back for the winter. Or are you all bark and no bite, _boy_?” Varin bared his teeth at the last.

"Just you _watch me, **old man!**_ " Lambert snarled, now utterly determined to wipe the smug look off the man’s face.

As Lambert stood there, fists clenched, Varin slowly grinned.

"Accepted."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops. That competitive attitude (and your perfectionism) is going to get you into trouble, Lambert.
> 
> ...
> 
> Well, that’s all for this particular story, folks, but there's going to be a sequel! I couldn't leave all those threads dangling.


End file.
